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Armenia - the oldest Christian nation in the world

HISTORICAL ARMENIA in Classical and Byzantine times covered a large area to the east of Asia Minor and to the south of the Caucasus range. To the south-east was the land of the Medes and Persians. The Black Sea lies north-west of Armenia, and the Caspian to the north-east. However, the Armenians have never enjoyed continuous access to these important seas.

The best known landmark of Armenia is Mount Ararat, on which according to the Book of Genesis Noah’s Ark alighted after its long voyage from Mesopotamia. Mount Ararat which the Armenians call ‘Masis’ is situated today a few miles inside the Turkish frontier, but is fully visible from many parts of Armenia. This fact helps to keep alive the feelings both of frustration and of national pride which are characteristic of Armenians everywhere.

The geographical name ‘Ararat’ is closely linked with that of Urartu, which is the name given by the Assyrians to the ancient kingdom which once existed on the territory of historical Armenia. This kingdom, originally a confederation of local tribes, flourished as a unified state from the ninth to the early sixth century 30; it constituted a formidable rival to Assyria for supremacy in the Near East.

The Urartian capital was the ancient city of Van, today in modem Turkey. Van is situated on the eastern shore of the large lake of that name. The plain of Van is very fertile, and this fertility was enhanced by magnificent aqueducts built by the ancient Urartians - some of the water channels remaining in use right up to modern times. Another Armenian granary is the broad Araxes valley, particularly in the vicinity of Erevan and near the ancient capital of Artashat. Some authors have even maintained that this region of Armenia was the original Garden of Eden.

Soon after 600 BC, Urartu was invaded by various warlike hordes, including the Scythians, the Medes (ancestors of the modem Kurds), and also a tribe known as the people of Hayasa. These Hayasa people came from central Anatolia, close to the old Hittite state. The Armenians call themselves ‘Hai-k’, and their country, Hayastan, and many modern scholars consider that this Hayasa element forms an important constituent in the makeup of the modern Armenian nation.

Less than a century after these invasions, we find the ethnic names ‘Armina’ and ‘Armenians’ or ‘Armenioi’ mentioned in Persian inscriptions and in Greek sources. Thus, the people of Armina were known to Great King Darius I Hystaspes of Iran (521 - 485 BC), who mentions them in an important royal inscription, and Herodotus, Father of History, was familiar with the Armenians.

The Armenian language is an independent, one-language subgroup within the Indo-European language family. However, the identification of ethnic origins with linguistic affinity is deceptive. It seems clear that the Armenians themselves, in the majority of cases, belong to an ancient population stratum of eastern Anatolia, akin to the ancient Hurrians and Urartians. We have only to look at ancient Hittite, Assyrian and Achaemenid sculptures to pick out the prototypes of the modern Armenians, praying, toiling, and bringing tribute to the Great Kings of the ancient world.

Up to the great dispersal between 1895 and 1915, Armenian life was generally marked by ethnic continuity and social conservatism. Considering the pressures which the Armenians have undergone over the centuries to become assimilated in various foreign environments, they have contrived to maintain a remarkable ethnic and cultural individuality, especially where they have been able to set up an offshoot of their ancient Apostolic Church. Some Armenian communities are in fact rather inbred, and many Armenians are still reluctant to tolerate intermarriage with non-Armenians, who are referred to rather contemptuously as ‘odars’ - an equivalent of the term ‘gentile’. Like the British in India under the Raj, Armenians have sometimes tended to create various taboos and erect invisible barriers to maintain their community ethos intact. This group solidarity has in turn helped to preserve over the centuries certain readily identifiable physical traits.

”The ‘Armenoid’ physical type is well known to anthropologists, and forms one of the three brunette subgroups of the broad-headed complex of white races This Armenoid type is quite conspicuous it has the skull abruptly flattened behind, while the head is characterized by a lofty vault, with what physical anthropologists call ‘outward-drooping orbits’. The hair is usually brown or black. The eyes are large, mostly hazel, brown or black in colour, often framed by bushy eyebrows. Occasionally one meets Armenians with lustrous blue eyes, which are very striking.

The Armenian physique is renowned for toughness and endurance. This befits the rugged terrain of most of the Armenian homeland. Although the Araxes valley and the Van region can be described as a land of milk and honey, more than half of historical Armenia consists of barren upland with a harsh climate. The landscape is cut up by enormous mountains, and prevailing weather conditions are more like those of the Scottish Highlands or the Rocky Mountains than those of most of the Fertile Crescent lands.

Nowadays, the Armenian mountaineers are athletic and relatively tall. However, the general type found in the older generations both in Armenia and the diaspora communities is rather short and compact. The nose is often prominent and bulbous or else aquilinc and high-bridged. The facial complexion is rather swarthy, and features are strongly marked. There is a tendency to chunky solidity in middle age. A bristling moustache, turned up at the ends, is often seen in the older generation of men.

Wherever fate may have led them, one is impressed by the Armenians’ intelligence and quick-wittedness. ‘Nothing escapes them,’ remarks that seasoned traveller, Sir Fitzroy Maclean. ‘They have read one’s thoughts almost before they have had time to take shape." Even in pagan times, two thousand years ago, Armenians were renowned as poets and musicians, as builders and sculptors, as orator: and philosophers, as generals and as hotel keepers.

In modern times, Armenians consistently display a high intelligence and are successful in a wide range of professional activities. They are renowned as scientists, mathematicians, doctors and dentists. They excel in the arts and in literature. Armenians are numbered among film directors, book illustrators, and among orchestral conductors and soloists. They are excellent cooks and famed for their hospitality. In spite of their tragic history, Armenians are noted for their sense of humour. They have also produced many outstanding administrators and military leaders.

A fine description of the manners and customs of ancient Armenia is provided by the Greek historian, philosopher and military adventurer Xenophon, who led his Ten Thousand followers through that country in the winter of 401-400 BC. After a gruelling march north wands through the wilds of Kurdistan, Xenophon’s men were happy to reach Armenia, west of Lake Van. The local Armenians offered the Greeks excellent wine, strong ale, lamb, kid, pork, veal and poultry. We learn that the Armenian aristocracy used beautiful drinking cups, and reclined on couches whose legs were cased in silver. The common people lived in houses partly tunnelled underground, both for security and to keep out the bitter winter cold. During this season, the family livestock was kept inside the houses, including goats, sheep, cattle and fowls together with their young. Such underground houses have continued to exist in Armenia and in Georgia right up to modern times.

After Alexander the Great overthrew the Persian Empire in 331 BC, the dynasty of the Orontids held sway in Armenia, until they were replaced by another ruling family, the Artaxiads, in 200 BC. In addition, there were smaller principalities and minor kingdoms in Western Armenia.

The most famous ruler of the Artaxiad dynasty was Tigrana the Great (95-55 BC), thanks to whom Armenia became, briefly, a world power. Tigranes built up an empire stretching from the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean, and from the Pontic Alps near the Black Sea right down to northern Mesopotamia. He profited by the decay of the hybrid Greek and oriental Seleucid dynasty to take over Syria, which he ruled quite successfully for fourteen years, from 83 to 69 BC. Tigranes erected a magnificent new capital at Tigranokerta, close to present-day Farkin, in southern Turkey.

Emulating the conquerors of Assyrian times, Tigranes deported many thousands of Greeks, Jews and Syrians to populate his new capital. He grew arrogant and cruel as he got older: he used to humiliate vassal rulers by making them run along on foot beside his royal charger whenever he went out for ‘a ride. He was so bad-tempered and superstitious that he would kill any messenger who brought him bad news, so that nobody dared to tell him the truth. Seeing the Roman general Lucullus approaching with a well trained army of ten thousand men, Tigranes uttered the famous but ill-judged witticism: ‘If they are coming as ambassadors, they are too many; if as enemies, they are too few !’

The territory of Great Armenia much exceeded in size that of England and Wales combined it amounted to about 100,000 square miles. But much of Armenia has always been unfit for human settlement. In addition to the two great inland seas of Van and Sevan, there are mighty mountains and extinct volcanoes, some topped by eternal snow. Ravine: and canyons break up the landscape, and make comunication difficult. Earthquakes add to the hazards of life.

The average height of the Armenian plateau, often described as a ‘natural fortress’, is over 5,000 feet. Outside the Araxes valley and the plain of Van, the windswept uplands have a harsh climate, winter persisting for seven months of the year. The short, dry summer extends for little more than three months. A typical highland Armenian town, such as Gyumri, has an average winter temperature as low as 12° F, or minus 11 C.

Even more unfavourable to the development of Armenia as an independent country is the lack of convenient road and river transport, and of assured access to the sea. Armenia lies astride main invasion routes leading from Asia Minor into Iran, and from the Caucasian isthmus southwards into Mesopotamia. But the land itself is poor in trunk roads., Whereas three great river: the Tigris, the Euphrates and the Araxes -all have their source in Armenia, none of them is navigable for any but the smallest vessels while still flowing through Armenian territory.

Despite these natural handicaps, combined with remorseless Roman pressure, the Armenians survived remarkably well throughout the Classical period. They were helped by their strategic position and inaccessible strongholds, and also by support from the Parthians, the warlike ruling dynasty of Iran. In fact, the Roman emperor Nero invited the founder of the Armenian dynasty of the Arsacids, King Tiridates I, to come to Rome in AD 66, and solemnly crowned him in the Forum in spite of the fact that Tiridata was himself a scion of the ruling Parthian royal family. On his return to Armenia, Tiridates built a magnificent temple in the Classical style at his summer capital of Garni. Destroyed by an earthquake in 1679, this monument has recently been re-erected by the Armenian Academy of Sciences, under the direction of Dr A. Sahinian.

During the Classical era, the Armenians laid the foundations of their rich and splendid national literature. It is true that the distinctive Armenian alphabet was not invented until after the introduction of Christianity, but pagan Armenia was far from being illiterate. From Moses of Khorene, the national chronicler, we have the texts of ancient ballads and legends, which were earlier handed down by word of mouth. Official documents and inscriptions were written in Greek or else in Iranian using Aramaic characters an ancient form of the Semitic alphabet. King Artavazd II, son of Tigranes the Great, maintained a Greek theatre in his palace, and himself wrote dramas in Greek to be staged there. Roman legionaries brought Latin script with them, notably in the reign of Emperor Trajan, though this failed to take root among the local population.

A key event in early Armenian history was the conversion of the country to Christianity by St Gregory the Illuminator, a missionary from Parthia, during the reign of King Tiridates III. This event determined the entire future course of Armenian history. It occurred in or about the year 301, though according to hallowed legend Armenia is supposed to have been visited by the Apostles Bartholomew and Thaddeus much earlier, about twenty years after Christ’s crucifixion. Armenia is thus the oldest Christian nation in the world, if we except the now vanished Christian realm of King Abgar of Edessa.

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The History of Norsemen, or Vikings

During the tenth century Charlemagne’s empire and Anglo-Saxon England were attacked by a new group of invaders known as Norsemen, or Vikings. They came from the far northern part of Europe now called Scandinavia. The tall, fair-skinned Vikings became known as brutal fighters and robbers. They spread fear and destruction throughout western Europe for several hundred years. At the same time, however, they opened up new trade routes and brought shipping skills to other Europeans.

The Vikings captured parts of Britain and France. They ruled cities in Russia and set up colonies on islands in the North Atlantic. They even paid a brief visit to North America. Those who went abroad married the people they conquered. They also accepted a new religion and customs. Others stayed in Scandinavia and set up the kingdoms of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark.

THE LAND

The Viking homeland of Scandinavia was an area mostly of forests and long, rugged coastlines. The southern part, known as Jutland, 0r Denmark, had many natural harbors. It also had large plains where the Vikings grew oats, barley, rye, and wheat and pastured their cattle, sheep, and pigs.

The rest of Scandinavia was not as well suited to farming. Winters were long and cold, summers short and mild, and the soil rocky. The coastline, however, had many fjords, or bays. So the people turned to the sea to making a living.

SHIPS AND TRADE

The Vikings built ships with timber from the dense forests and sailed out of the fjords onto the sea to make a living. The ships were large and well suited for long voyages. The bodies were long and narrow. The sides, where a single row of 16 oars was placed, were usually decorated with black or yellow painted shields. The tall bows were carved in the shape of a dragon’s head. This was supposed to frighten both enemies and the evil spirits of the ocean. The strongly sewn sails were square and often striped red and yellow. The ships bore names like “Snake of the Sea,” “Raven of the Wind,” and “Lion of the Waves.”

An awning in the forepart of the ship protected the sailors from bad weather. They slept in leather sleeping bags and carried bronze pots in which to cook their meals. Whenever possible, they cooked their meals ashore to avoid the danger of a fire on board ship.

The Vikings plotted their courses by the positions of the sun and stars. They sailed far out into the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean in search of good fishing areas and trade. They did most of their traveling and trading in the spring after their fields were sown, or in the fall after their crops were harvested. They spent the long winters in their villages repairing their boats and weapons.

The Vikings were as successful in trade as the Phoenicians. Viking traders carried furs, hides, fish, and slaves to western Europe and the Mediterranean. They returned from these areas with silk, wine, wheat, and silver.

TOWNS, VlLLAGES, AND JARLS

Trade led to the growth of market towns in Scandinavia. These towns usually had two main streets that ran along the water’s edge. Buyers and sellers set up booths and displayed their wares along the streets. The towns were protected on their land side by mounds of earth surrounded by wooden walls with towers.

Most Vikings lived in villages scattered throughout the country. Their houses were made of logs or boards. The roots, which were made of sod-covered wood, slanted steeply to shed the heavy winter snows. Carvings of dragons decorated gables at either end. In front of each house was a small porch supported by carved pillars.

Distance and the cold winters isolated the people of one village from those of another. As a result, there was no central government. The people were divided into groups ruled by military Chieftains calIed jarls. Jarls either inherited their position or were elected to it. They saw to it that their group’s laws were obeyed. Sometimes a jarl became strong enough to take over and unite neighboring territories. When a jarl had enough territory under his rule, he was recognized as a king.

Most Viking adventurers, however, went to western and southern Europe in search of food and valuables. They disguised their ships to look like wooded islands by covering them with tree branches. Then they traveled far up the rivers to make surprise attacks. They stole goods, destroyed homes, burned churches, and killed or sold as slaves any people they captured. All Europe feared the Vikings. In their churches the people prayed, “From the fury of the Norsemen, Good Lord, deliver us!”

THE DANES

Some of the Danish Vikings Settled in the areas they raided. One group of Danes invaded England and set up settlements there. In 954 an heir of Alfred the Great forced them to leave the Danelaw. In 978 Ethelred, nicknamed the Unready, became king of England. The Danes saw their chance and began raiding England again. At first Ethelred was able to buy them off with silver. But in 1017 a Danish king called Knut, or Canute, took over the country and made it part of his North Sea Empire. Canute was a powerful but just ruler. He converted to Christianity and brought peace and prosperity to England. Soon after his death in 1035, however, Danish control of England came to an end. Some Danes left England. Those who remained became a part of the English people and culture.

DAILY LIFE

Family life was important to the Vikings. Most households contained 20 to 30 members including parents, grandparents, married children, and grandchildren. Families often fought bloody feuds to maintain their honor. The payment of fines later put an end to such feuds.

THE PEOPLE

Viking men were warriors called berserkers. They believed in a life of action and valued deeds that called for strength and courage. They fought to gain wealth, honor, and fame. They believed that a liking for war brought special honors from the gods.

To call their warriors to battle, the Vikings lit bonfires on the tops of mountains. Those who saw a fire would light a new one to spread the message. The warriors fought with battle axes, swords, and spears. Metal helmets decorated with animal figures protected their heads. Shirts made of iron rings and covered by a large cloth protected their bodies. The warriors preferred to die by their own hand rather than give their enemies the satisfaction of capturing or killing them.

A Viking groom bought his wife from her family on their wedding day. If he was not pleased with her, he could sell her. Yet the position of Viking women was quite high. They took complete charge of the home. They could attend public meetings and talk with men other than their husbands. They could own property and get a divorce. Many Viking women grew herbs which were used as medicine. All the women encouraged their men to fight.

Both men and women liked fine clothes. The men usually dressed in trousers and woolen shirts covered by knee-length tunics. Broad leather belts held the clothing in place. Sheepskin hoods and caps kept heads warm. For special events the men wore red cloaks with brooches and carried decorated swords and daggers. The women also wore tunics held in place by a belt. They covered their heads with woolen or linen caps, and wore large brooches, pins, and bracelets. Both men and women wore their hair long, and the men took great pride in their mustaches and beards. Calling a Viking man “beardless” was an insult that could be wiped out only by death.

The Vikings had no schools. Parents taught daughters such household skills as spinning, weaving, and sewing. They taught sons to use the bow and arrow and to be good fighters. The boys also memorized tales of heroic warriors and gods, and competed in games that tested their strength and endurance.

RELIGION

The Vikings worshipped many gods which at first were closely ”related to Germanic gods. In time they changed the names and activities of their gods to suit the harsh life 0f Scandinavia. The Vikings believed that the gods were responsible for the weather and for the growth of crops . Since the gods liked to hunt, fish, and play tricks on one another, the Vikings viewed them as extra powerful human beings.

The Vikings bargained with their gods to get what they wanted. Priests offered sacrifices of crops and animals on behalf of the whole community. Most Vikings also had small shrines in their homes where they could pray or offer sacrifices.

The Vikings were proud of their gods and told stories of their great deeds. These stories later became written poems called eddas. The Vikings also composed sagas, or epic stories. At first skilled storytellers used to recite sagas at special banquets. One such saga took 12 days to recite. After 1100 the Vikings wrote down their sagas. With the coming of Christianity, the people lost interest in these tales. Many were forgotten or were forbidden by the Church. Only the people of Iceland passed on the old tales.

At first the Vikings spoke a language similar to that of the Germans. In time the one language developed into four Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, and Icelandic. They were written with letters called runes, which few people except the priests could understand or use. The Vikings used the runes as magic charms. They wrote the runes in metal and carved them in bone in the hope that they would bring good luck. When the Vikings accepted Christianity, they began to write their language with Roman letters.

RAIDS AND ADVENTURERS

Scandinavia’s population kept increasing. By the end of the ninth century many Viking villages were overcrowded, and there was not enough food for everyone. Since there was no central government, the kings constantly fought one another and made life difficult for their enemies. Before long many Viking warriors began to seek their fortunes elsewhere.

Groups of warriors attacked merchant ships on the open seas. Danish Vikings began raiding the coasts of France, England, and Spain. Swedish Vikings crossed the Baltic Sea and traveled down the rivers toward Russia. They founded settlements and began to trade. They established a water route from the Baltic to the Black Sea and on to the wealthy city of Byzantium. This water route came to be known as the Varangian Route. In 862 a Swedish Chieftain named Rurik founded a Viking state that became the basis of the Russian monarchy. Norwegian Vikings established trading towns in Ireland, explored the North Atlantic, and founded a colony on the island of Iceland.

Led by an adventurer named Eric the Red, the Norwegian Vikings began to move even further west. In 986 they founded a colony on the island of Greenland. Then Eric’s son, Leif Ericson, sailed across the Atlantic Ocean and landed on the northeast coast of North America. He and his followers named the spot where they landed Vinland because of the wild grapes they found growing there. Today the area is called Newfoundland. The Vikings did not set up a permanent colony in Vinland because it was so far away from home and the winters were so cold.

SUMMARY

The Vikings lived in northern Europe in an area which is today known as Scandinavia.

The Vikings were excellent warriors, sailors. and navigators who earned their living mainly by fishing and by trading with other European regions.

The Vikings lived in villages that were basically isolated from one another. The Vikings worshipped many gods and often told stories about their great deeds.

At first the Vikings spoke one language, but over time it developed into four separate languages.

When the Vikings accepted Christianity, they stopped writing their languages in runes and began to write with Roman letters.

By the ninth century Scandinavia was overpopulated, so many Viking warriors began to seek their fortunes in other places.

In 862 a Swedish Viking named Rurik established a settlement, and that settlement later developed into the Russian nation.

In 986 Norwegian Vikings founded a colony on Greenland, and several years later sailed as far west as the northeast coast of North America.

In 1017 a Danish king named Canute conquered England, but after his death Danish control of England came to an end.

Other Danish Vikings, after besieging Paris, settled along the French coast in an area known as Normandy.

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General Franco and the Legacy of the Civil War

On a sunny April day in 1939 the Nationalist troops entered Madrid. They found a city gaunt and semi-starving after nearly three years of civil war. From then until he died in November 1975, their commander-in-chief, who had been appointed Chief of the Government of the Spanish State by his fellow generals in September 1936, ruled Spain as Caudillo by the grace of God, as his coins announced, and as chief of state and head of government, prime minister and president all in one. What was an emergency wartime government became the foundation of the Spanish state. By two decrees (30 January 1938 and 8 August 1939) Franco gave himself the power to pass any law or decree he chose. He was a Hobbesian sovereign. As his constitutional lawyers defined his powers, he was a ‘constituent dictator’ the limits of whose powers were self-imposed; as he himself defined his responsibilities in the exercise of this dictatorship, these were to God and History.

What sort of man was General Franco? Like many authoritarian characters he was short, becoming rather podgy in his old age. He was born in 1892 in a modest home in the poor north-western province of Galicia, and his whole career had been spent in the infantry. He had made his name as a brave and exceptionally competent officer in the tough, guerrilla-like campaigns in Morocco where he served, with few breaks, between 1912 and 1925. A professional soldier, his promotions, won on the battlefield, made him at 33 the youngest general in Europe since Bonaparte. He was accustomed to command and his model of society was military. Soldiers, well commanded, obey; subjects well ruled do likewise. Civil disobedience was mutiny. In 1934 he organised the suppression of the miners of the Asturias as if they had been Berber hill tribesmen.

His view of Spanish society and its history can be summed up in One sentence. Great Spain, the Spain of the Catholic kings and their Vast American empire, had been destroyed by democratic parliamentarianism based on universal suffrage. It was classic nineteenth-century liberalism, in its Spanish .form, run, he held, by freemasons (to the end of his life Franco remained obsessed by freemasonry and could rage against it in 1974 as an all-powerful worldwide conspiracy) and manipulated by selfish party politicians that had presided over the ‘disaster’ of 1898. In that year the United States overwhelmed Spain on land and sea and seized the remnants of her colonial empire Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. It was this disaster that robbed Franco of his chosen career: he wanted to enter the navy, but the cuts after 1898 robbed him of the chance. Political parties had degraded Spain; they must be destroyed for ever. In 1952 he declared, ‘We hate political parties’. The ‘inorganic democracy’ of universal suffrage and political parties must be replaced by organic democracy based on a corporative suffrage that would represent the ‘true’ interests of the nation, neglected by party politicians who appealed to selfish individual or class interests. He never changed his views. When in 1967 there was a discussion of ‘political associations’ as innocuous means of expressing ‘contrasts of opinion’ within the regime, Franco warned that ‘if on the excuse of the contrast of opinions what is being sought are political parties, let those who wish this know clearly that they will never come’. And within his lifetime they did not. ‘Liberal decadence’ he repeated monotonously throughout his life, must degenerate into Marxism.

The democratic Second Republic of 1931-6 represented the culmination of this process of disintegration. Run by masons and Marxists, it threatened in the summer of 1936 to hand over Spain to Communists, and by failing to maintain public order it allowed the government to be cowed by ‘the street’. Hesitating and cautious - the bolder spirits called him ‘Miss Canary Island of 1936’ - Franco finally committed himself to an armed rising against the government of the Popular Front in the summer of 1936.

Here General Franco’s views linked up with those of the nineteenth-century officer corps and with the example of General Primo de Rivera who had overthrown the parliamentary system by a pronunciamiento in September 1923 and ruled Spain as an ‘iron surgeon’ until 1930. The officer corps believed it owed allegiance to the nation, not to any government. It was the duty of the officer corps to interpret the national will, corrupted by the selfishness of politicians. If a government betrayed the nation, if government ‘fell into the gutter’, then the army must save the nation. Passive obedience to any government made military discipline mechanical and degrading. The officer corps obeyed this higher duty to the nation when it rose against the Popular Front government on 18 July 1936, and let loose a civil war that lasted for thirty-two months until 1939.

‘We did not win the regime we have today hypocritically with some votes,’ Franco reminded Spaniards in 1962. ‘We won it at the point of the bayonet and with the blood of our best people.’ The political scientists and constitutional lawyers who decorated his regime subsequently added other legitimisations to that of victory in the Civil War. There was the legitimacy of performance the maintenance of a ‘social peace’ which, it was held, brought unparalleled prosperity: the ‘constituent dictatorship’ of the forties became the ‘dictatorship of development’ in the Spain of the booming sixties. Already in a speech in December 1955 Franco asserted that his political system had presided over the ‘rebirth of the nation’. There was endorsement by the sovereign nation of the power of Franco in the two referenda of 1947 and 1966 with their massive ‘Yes’ votes. Not least, Franco himself shared with Primo de Rivera and Fidel Castro what has been called ‘the democracy of the public square’ the endorsement of the mass audiences felt directly by the dictator. He consistently claimed that the ‘spontaneous’ acclaim of organised crowds legitimised his rule. “Valencia has said “yes” to my policies,’ he confided to his cousin, ‘and has given a true approbation of my leadership’ (June 1962). Behind all lay the mystical powers of the charismatic leader, the providential saviour of Spain. This was a role Franco repeatedly claimed for himself. When he asked the country to ratify the Organic Law (radio speech 12 December 1966) he claimed sufficient title from ‘the right of him who has saved a society’: the precise role of the Weberian charismatic saviour.

Though this charismatic unction weakened with time, sustained by public adulation it never vanished. It was a curious charisma. Franco was anunimpressive public speaker with a squeaky voice. His private personality seemed ordinary; his court formal and boring. His recreations were shooting and fishing, to which he would devote weeks on end to the neglect of his official duties Spain, he once said, was easy to govern. His habits were bourgeois - he was very much a family man -and traditionally pious.

Apart from the police apparatus he controlled, what then, was the secret of this ordinary man’s extraordinary powers? He had that quality which Louis XIV possessed: those who came into his presence were frightened of him and subdued.

Power - and Franco could dismiss any of his political servants at will, unrestrained by feelings of gratitude for devoted service -breeds power. He was (until 1973) head of state and prime minister, carrying out formal duties like the reception of ambassadors and presiding over important cabinet meetings. He was Jefe de! Movimiento -chief of the only pOIitic'al organisation in Spain and Generalisimo . Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces. As he grew older he exercised his powers less directly and had no particular interest in the details of policy except when they concerned foreign affairs, public order and the army. He let his ministers formulate policy. When they became ‘exhausted’ he dismissed them. On' 28 July 1966 General Muiioz Grandes, veteran of the Civil War and commander of the Blue Division in Russia, a grandee of the regime regarded by many as a possible successor to Franco, read that he had been relieved of his office as Vice-President of the Government in the morning issue of the Official Gazette.

This ruthlessness was a reflection of two qualities that to his adulators and the personality cult of Franco in a subservient press was as excessive as that of Stalin constituted his political genius: prudence and pragmatism. These qualities the Caudillo undoubtedly possessed. However, pragmatism and prudence can disguise political obstinacy and a penchant for procrastination, a refusal to face up to the Solution of difficult problems by denying their existence. Political myopia was intensified by Franco’s belief that domestic difficulties student revolts and labour strikes in particular -' were the work of minority groups inspired from abroad, a revival of the anti-Spain of masons and Marxists, supported by the Soviet Union, defeated in 1939. Like the stereotype of the ‘anarchic’ Spaniard, which be consistently used as the justification for authoritarianism and the denial of democratic rights, he manipulated another stereotype: that of a hostile world that obstinately refused to "understand his regime and its achievements. Combined with an iron political nerve -when the United Nations was sending Spain to an international Coventry, Franco spent the day painting this constant reference to the machinations 'of foreign devils was a recipe for political immobilism.

Franco’s vision of himself as the saviour of Spain in a Crusade to rescue ‘true’ Spain from ‘anti’-Spain and its foreign allies was to set its mark on the history of Spain for four, decades. The most important legacy of the Civil War was the subsequent division of Spanish society into two camps: the victors (vencedores) and the vanquished (vencidos). The vencedores would rule and enjoy the fruits of power, the vencidos never. They had represented for the victors absolute evil. Serrano Suner was the most intelligent politician in wartime Nationalist Spain. Dionisio Ridruejo, a close collaborator, tells us that ‘his image of the two sides in the war was that of good against evil’. Hardly surprisingly, since his two brothers had been murdered in the early days of the war, a traumatic personal grief from which he never recovered, and which, since he himself escaped, seems to have left a sense of guilt.

All this was emphasised by the terrible repressions of the 1940s when those who had sided with the Republic of the Popular Front were persecuted, tortured, killed or driven into exile. How could those in power after 1939 contemplate national reconciliation? Since they could only expect vengeance at the hands of the vanquished, the vanquished must be placed in perpetual ostracism. This was what in the 1940s was called ‘el pacto de la sangre’ (‘the blood contract’), and it implied the exclusion of half of Spain from political life. If repentant Republicans were later welcomed as lost sheep, to the end of the regime no one who did not profess to share ‘the ideals that gave birth to the Crusade’ could serve the state.

Obviously this Manichaean, absolutist division became weaker with time and was always softened by personal connection. But why did it persist so long? Firstly because Franco was determined that no one should forget the Civil War because it was his victory over ‘anti-Spain’ that legitimised his rule. For him the Manichaean vision never faded. When, in 1968, it was proposed that the excombatants of the Republic should get pensions as did the Nationalists, to Franco the mere suggestion was an outrage (‘You can’t combine a glorious army [i.e. his own] with the scum of the Spanish population.’)

Not only Franco himself, but the right in general, was determined to keep the divisions of the Civil War alive in Spanish society. Victory in 1939 was their passport to power and influence; more than that, its enthusiasms remained the essential centre of their emotional being. Western historians have given particular emphasis to the mobilisation of political enthusiasm on the Republican side in the Civil War because they sympathise with it. Yet Nationalist Spain had its own all-pervading wartime mystique that spilled over into the 1940s and was kept alive by organisations of Civil War combatants. To take away the memory of this emotional experience from the veterans of the Civil War was to make their lives meaningless. Giron, a veteran Falangist and for many years Minister of Labour, declared that the memory of the dead of the Civil War was not to be ‘devoured with impunity by pigs’.

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The spread of industrialism in Europe and beyond

In other countries, in Europe and elsewhere, industrialization came at different times and in somewhat different contexts. Nevertheless, history seems on the whole to have repeated itself every time, although it was concerned with different societies, different economies and different civilizations. Reduced to its economic essentials, in fact, every industrial revolution followed roughly the same fairly simple ‘model’, as economists would say.

Three stages: this was the hypothesis put forward in 1952 by the American economist Walt W. Rostow. Although debatable, it certainly clarified the discussion.

At the beginning, the key moment is take-off. As an aircraft accelerates along the runway, then lifts off, so an economy about to expand rises quite steeply from the industrial ancien regime that held it down. Normally, take-off occurs in a single sector, or at most in two. It was cotton in Britain and in New England (the special case of an ‘American’ take-off); in France, Germany, Canada, Russia and the United States it was the railways; in Sweden it was building timber and iron-ore mines. In each case, the key sector darts forward, modernizing rapidly: the speed of its growth and the modernity of its technology are precisely what distinguish this phenomenon from previous industrial expansion, Which lacked both explosive force and long-term staying power. The industry that has thus shot ahead increases its output, improves its technology, organizes its marketing and then stimulates the rest of the economy.

After that the key industry, having served as a motor, settles at its cruising altitude: it has performed its task. The reserves it has helped to accumulate then move to another sector, often related to the first; and that in its turn takes off, modernizes and reaches its ideal height.

As this process extends from one sector to another, the economy as a whole attains industrial maturity. In Western Europe, after the take-off of the railways (i.e. of iron, coal and heavy industry), it was the turn of steel, modern shipbuilding, chemicals, electricity and machine tools. Much later, Russia followed the same path. In Sweden, the essential roles were played by wood pulp (for paper making), timber and iron. Generally speaking, it was in the first years of the twentieth century that the Western world as a whole reached the threshold of maturity. Britain, which had crossed it in about 1850, now found herself more or less on a level with her partners.

At that point, these experienced and fairly well-balanced economies, which had secured adequate incomes and achieved a certain abundance, no longer saw industrial expansion as their primordial goal. Where now were they to direct their power and their possible investment? Faced with the choice for choice had become possible - not all the industrial societies reacted in the same way. Their different responses reflected the nature of the History they had so far lived through, and partly determined their future. It will be no surprise to learn that they based their choices, consciously or not, on the nature of their different civilizations.

Time to choose: what has to be chosen is a style of life to suit a whole society. There are a number of options. One might concentrate on careful social legislation, taking as its priorities the security, well-being and leisure of the whole population. One might decide that well-being depended on widespread mass consumption, with enough goods and services of a high standard produced to supply the vast majority. Or one might, finally, use the greater power of the society or the nation in the often vain and always dangerous quest for dominance in world politics.

The turn of the century, around 1900, saw the maturity of the United States. Briefly but significantly, it then tried power politics, in the form of the 1898'war against Spain for‘Cuba and the Philippines. This would seem to have been a conscious gesture, in View of Theodore Roosevelt’s writing at the time that ‘the United States needed a war’, or that it had to be given ‘something to think about other than material gain’. A few years later, it made timid and ephemeral attempts to pursue a progressive social policy. But after the interruption caused by the First World War, the United States committed itself fully to the option of mass consumption, with the boom in automobiles, in building and in household gadgets.

In Western Europe, the moment of decision was delayed by two World Wars and by the need for postwar reconstruction. Broadly speaking, mass consumption made its appearance after 1950, but with the restrictions and modifications imposed by government policy and by the pressure of a powerful Socialist tradition. In France, for example, these included the series of social laws ranging from free education to the medical organization of, ‘social security’. Some sectors, moreover, lagged behind completely, by force of circumstances or on account of reluctance to abandon traditional ways. To take one example, the agricultural revolution, American-style, ran into countless obstacles in continental Europe. The constant problems faced in this field by the Soviet Union are well known; and the situation is also complicated in France and Italy, neither of which has yet full modernized its agriculture.

Finally, not all regions were equally involved in the process. Just as the South of the United States remained backward long after 1900, so large parts of Europe lagged behind. They included the South-West and West of France, the mezzogiomo in Italy, the Whole Iberian Peninsula outside the industrial centres of Barcelona and Bilbao, all the Communist republics (except the USSR itself, Czechoslovakia and the German Democratic Republic), the rest of the Balkans and Turkey.

In short, there have always been these two Europes, described ,by a journalist in 1929 as the Europe of the car and the Europe of the cart. T0 take one symbol out of thousands, we need only go near Cracow, on a road where narrow four-wheeled wagons laden with wood, and flocks of geese with their drovers, are mom numerous than the automobiles. Yet suddenly we see the hugs installations of Nova Huta, that town of metallurgical industries founded from nothing by Socialist Poland. Such contrasts are still an integral part of life in Europe today.

Credit, financial capitalism, and State capitalism; a credit revolution accompanied the Industrial Revolution, and fully profited from its success.

Capitalism of a kind has always existed, as witness ancient Babylon, which had bankers, merchants engaged in distant trade, and all the instruments of credit, such as bills of exchange, promissory notes, cheques, etc, In this sense, the history of capitalism extends “from the Hammurabi to Rockefeller’. But credit in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries still had a very restricted role. It developed considerably in the eighteenth century, By then, if only on account of trade with India and the East India Companies, or trade with China, which helped develop Canton, there was already a form of international capitalism, covering most of the commercial centres in Europe. At that time, however, financiers as such hardly concerned themselves with trade or industry: they managed public funds in the service of the State.

With the success of industrialization, banking and finance developed very rapidly. So much so that, alongside industrial capitalism, financial capitalism gained the upper hand and sooner or later controlled all the levers governing economic life. In France and Britain, its ascendancy became clear in the 1860s. Old and new banks extended their networks, and specialized as deposit banks, credit banks, merchant banks, etc. To follow the modernization of banking, it would be useful to trace in France, for example, the history of Credit Lyonnais, founded in 1863, that Of Pierpont ‘ Morgan in, the United States, or the international network of the Rothschilds. Everywhere, banks succeeded in attracting a huge clientele, ‘all the savings-minded public’; they sought and captured all dormant or sterile deposits’, no matter how small. And the graze for ‘shares’ began. Industries, railways, shipping companies were gradually caught up in this complex banking network; and die operations of financial capitalism at once became international. french banks allowed themselves to be tempted more and more by the attractions of foreign loans. Thus it was that French savers cook the perilous path of loans to Russia. Yet these foreign loans were at one time an important source of income for the French economy: a favourable balance of payments offset a deficit in the balance of trade. After 1850, they also contributed to basic investments in much of Europe and elsewhere.

Today, the heyday of financial capitalism in Europe seems to have passed, despite the theoretical debates that the subject can always arouse, and despite a certain number of exceptions that prove the rule. Thus, a merchant bank like the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas is still a very major power, and London, Paris, Frankfurt, Amsterdam, Brussels, Zurich and Milan remain vital financial centres. But - despite disillusionment with State Socialism, and despite efforts to limit public spending, partly by privatization State capitalism has become a leading feature of the scene.

In the ‘nationalized’ sectors of those economies where State control has increased, the State itself has become an industrialist and a banker. Even elsewhere, its role has grown enormously since the nineteenth century. Extensive taxation, coupled with investment in public funds such as (in France) comptes-chéques postaux, ‘caisses d’épargnes and bons du Trésor, or (in Britain) National Savings, Government loans or Treasury Bonds, has put at Governments disposal enormous sums of money. The State is the grand master of investment in the infrastructure of industry, without which there can be no policies of growth, no effective social Programmes and in a word no future.

Every year, even to ensure progress as modest as ours appears to be, a large slice of the national income has to be invested. Investment multiplies its own initial impact by stimulating a whole series of economic transactions. More and more, it looks as if States need to plan their economic development, if only in the sense of setting targets and predicting the results of concerted action. The Soviet Union’s famous five-year plans have been imitated all over the world. In January 1962, President J, F. Kennedy actually announced a five-year plan for US trade! France’s own indicative five-year plans have in the past provoked lively controversy. They are, in their way, a national heart... searching as well as an economic balance-sheet. One of their aims is to assist take-off in backward regions by what they call ‘a policy of training’.

Looking back on the Industrial Revolution and its repercussions, we should neither omit nor exaggerate the driving force of colonialism. It did not give Europe her central, predominant place in the world; but it may well have helped her to retain it. By ‘colonialism’ - another debatable word -we mean all European expansion, at least since 1492.

Undeniably, expansion favoured Europe. It gave her access to new areas in which to settle her surplus population and, nearby, rich and exploitable civilizations which she did not fail to exploit. The major landmarks in this process of exploitation were: in the sixteenth century, the arrival of ‘treasures’ (gold and silver ingots) from America; the brutal opening-up of India after the battle of Plassey (23 June 1757), at which the British defeated the nawab of Bengal; the forced exploitation of the Chinese market after the First Opium War in 1839-42; and the partition of Africa at Berlin in 1885.

The result, in Europe, was to establish huge trading concerns in the Iberian Peninsula, the Low Countries and then the British Isles, altogether greatly strengthening some of those capitalist networks which assisted the progress of industrialization. Europe gained a large surplus from these distant lands overseas.

And that surplus played its part. It was no coincidence that Britain, so successful overseas, was the first to enjoy ‘take-off’. It still remains to be established whether, as we believe, the Industrial Revolution later consolidated colonialism, to Europe’s benefit, by confirming European primacy and prestige. There is no doubt, however, that France‘s industrial growth was independent of her presence in Senegal or her establishment in Algeria (1830), Cochinu-Chim (1858437) and Tonkin and Annam (1883).

Equally debatable is the human and moral record of colonialism as such. It is a complex question, in which guilt and responsibility are not all on one side Colonialism had both positive and negative aspects. Only one thing is certain: the history of that type of colonialism is over: the page is turned.

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Formation of a Lithuanian State

Soldiers for the 1207 expedition into the lands along the Dvina conquered by the Germans, were enlisted from all over Lithuania (i.e., not only in the land of Lithuania itself). In 1212, Lithuanian Prince Dangerutis signed a treaty with Novgorod against Livonia. Dangerutis’ rule probably encompassed a large territory otherwise there would have been no point in Novgorod making such an agreement. In 1219, twenty-one senior Lithuanian princes signed a treaty with Volynia. Among them were Živinbudas, Dausprungas and his brother Mindaugas, Daujotas and his brother Vilikaila, and princes from Žemaitian, Deltuva, Ruskavičius, and Bulevičius families. They acted as a united front, and. though the Žemaitian and Deltuva princes could not have had any direct contact with Volynia, no one ruler was considered emi’ nent. This fact is borne out by common Lithuanian endeavours, and the process, if not the completion, of the unification of the state. There have been historians - including Henryk Paszkiewicz, a major researcher in this area who claim that Lithuania was already united prior to the 1219 treaty. Paszkiewicz’s strongest argument included the father of Mindaugas, the future ruler of Lithuania, who was supposedly the most powerful of the Lithuanian princes, as well as the circumstances of a strong expansion by Lithuanian princes into Rus’ and into the junction of the Lithuanian owned buffer zone (formed at the turn of the twelfth century) between it and Rus’. But even they agree that at the turn of the twelfth century, the rulers of a unified Lithuania were not able to maintain authority for long periods of time. A radical concept of the formation of a Lithuanian state has recently been presented by Tomas Baranauskas. He dates the formation of the duchy of Lithuania, and the emergence of a stable state organisation in Lithuanian lands, in approximately the eleventh century. He also maintains that the more frequent and forceful Lithuanian expeditions into Rus’ after 1183 are proof of the existence of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and claims that the “Lithuanian Duchy” expanded constantly, uniting all of the Lithuanian lands, from the eleventh century onward. Sources, however, indicate the probability of other roads, including first of all the aforementioned unification of Lithuanian tribes/lands into a not necessarily stable political structure, and the skillful transformation of that structure into a state. In keeping with H. Paszkiewicz, these processes would be the ebbs he indicates in the formation of the state, i.e., when several senior princes once again replaced the ruler of a united Lithuania -thus showing that the formation of the state had not yet been completed.

In the end, we are left having to agree with Henryk Lowmianski, Vladimir Pashuto, and Edvardas Gudavičius, who, without uniformly interpreting the level of socio-economic development in the Lithuanian lands, or the context and meaning of the effects of outside factors, have grounds for stating that the work of unifying Lithuania fell upon the aforementioned Prince Mindaugas of the land of Lithuania (in the narrow sense).

In working to unify the lands of the Lithuanians into one state, Mindaugas encountered diverse unfavourable external and internal factors. His endeavours were taking place while the Order of the Knights of the Sword, the Catholic Church, and German merchants were consolidating in Livonia. The lands of the Lithuanians became of interest to these forces and their distant protectors, the Pope and the Emperor. From 1228 onward, Lithuania is mentioned as one of the pagan lands to be conquered, and is targeted in a crusade proclaimed by Pope Gregory IX in 1236. The Order and its aides were defeated, however, at the Battle of Saulė not by Mindaugas, but by the Žemaitian, Prince Vykintas. As well as revealing the capabilities of a Lithuania undergoing unification, this battle disclosed the serious internal problems in Livonia, a state on the verge of collapse. The Pope’s attempts to expand his own personal authority into the Baltic lands were also unsuccessful. At that point, the Order of the Knights of the Sword was restructured, and under the name of the Livonian Order, became a branch of the Teutonic Order warring on Prussian lands. '

These events in themselves did not directly affect the heart of the Lithuanian lands, though the conquest of the Prussians by the Teutonic Order, which began in 1231, as well as the unification of the two Orders, could not have escaped notice by the Lithuanians. Two highly aggressive state powers had formed and from Germany, who ultimately created the State of the Teutonic Order, and Livonia. In 1207 Livonia became an imperial vassal, and in 1226 the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order became an imperial prince. Bringing Christianity into the Balt lands, and creating states therein, was part of the great German advance towards the East (Drang nacb Osten). Where it happened peacefully, without coercion and military exploits, e.g., in the case of the expansion of German townspeople and city rights throughout Central and Eastern Europe, the results were positive and fruitful. In the Balt lands, however, other means were rejected, and innovations were attempted by military force. The results in Prussian, Latvian and other Balt, as well as Estonian and Liv lands were of a conflicting nature. The Catholic Church, Livonian and Teutonic Orders, and the Hanseatic League merchants brought Christian culture, the fortunes of civilisation, and a superior social organisation to the conquered lands, but these remained foreign properties. Social barriers emerged between the new-comers and the local inhabitants, who were exploited; their social structures were destroyed, and all possibilities for harmonious development within their own societies were in essence annihilated. Social subjugation was accompanied by ethnic oppression non-Germans became inferior people. ‘ Lithuanians living in the vicinity of these young and aggressive states were also threatened by a similar fate as witnessed by the crusade against it in 1236. The Livonian factor had invaded the process of the unification of Lithuania.

Unification must have taken place during the third and fourth decades of the thirteenth century with no mention of the other senior princes of the 1219 treaty. Sources reveal no agenda of events, but they do have something to say about the methods that Mindaugas used: he took up arms and assassinated certain rivals, with some of the princes submitting to his will and serving as his vassals, while others became subjects via the ritual of marriage. In other words, he acted in a similar manner to other state unifiers during a period of transformation from a pre-state to a state existence. By approximately 1245, Mindaugas was being called supreme king, and it was understood that all of the Lithuanian lands and those of certain neighbours - southern Selonia, Black Rus’, possibly the Rus’ian castles of Breslav and Minsk were in the hands of a single sovereign. His later documents indicate that his authority, though probably only nominally, was also recognised by Nadruva, Skalva, and the Yotvingians in northern Sudavia.

Thus was the state of Lithuania born established by Mindaugas at the turn of the fourth decade of the thirteenth century. Seeking to rise above the other princes and to force them to obey his will, wishing to expand his territories, and implementing his own personal aspirations, he carried out an exceptionally crucial and important work in terms of the entire Lithuanian world at that time i.e., he united all of their lands into a single state. The first stage of building a State of Lithuania was thereby completed. However, the newly created state, or to be more exact, the state which was being created, found itself in immediate danger, and was forced to defend its right to exist.

*Zigmas Kiaupa - The History of Lithuania

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Best World War II Non-fiction History Books

ABRAMSKY, C. (ed.), Essays in Honour of E. H. Carr ('The Initiation of the Negotiations Leading to the Nazi-Soviet Pact: A Historical Problem’, D. C. Watt) Macmillan, 1974

ABYZOV, VLADIMIR, The Final Assault, Novosti, Moscow, 1985

ALEXANDROV, VICTOR, The Kremlin, Nerve-Centre of Russian History, George Allen 8: Unwin, 1963

ALLILUYEVA, SVETLANA, Only One Year, Hutchinson, 1969

Twenty Letters to a Friend, Hutchinson, 1967

AMORT, R., and JEDLICKA, I. M., The Canan's File, Wingate, 1974

ANDERS, LIEUTENANT-GENERAL W., An Army in Exile, Macmillan, 1949

ANDREAS-FRIEDRICH, RUTH, Berlin Underground, 1939-1945, Latimer House, 1948

ANON, A Short History of the Bulgarian Communist Party, Sofia Press, Sofia, 1977

ANON, The Crime of Katyn, Facts and Documents, Polish Cultural Foundation, 1965

ANON, The Obersalzberg and the Third Reich, Plenk Verlag, Berchtesgaden, 1982

ANTONOV-OUSEYENKO, ANTON, The Time of Stalin, Portrait of a Tyranny, Harper & Row, New York, 1981

BACON, WALTER, Finland, Hale, 1970

BARBUSSE, HENRI, Stalin: A New World Seen Through One Man, Macmillan, New York, 1935

BAYNES, N. H. (ed), Hitler’s Speeches, 1922-39, 2 vols, OUP, 1942

BEAUFRE, ANDRE, 1940: The Fall of France, Cassell, 1968

BECK, JOSEF, Demier Rapport, La Baconniére, Brussels, 1951

BEDELL SMITH, WALTER, Moscow Mission 1946-1949, Heinemann, 1950

BELOFF, MAX, The Foreign Policy of Soviet Russia, Vol Two, 1936-1941, Oxford, 1949

BEREZHKOV, VALENTIN, History in the Making, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1983

BIALER, S., Stalin and His Generals, Souvenir Press, 1969

BIELENBERG, CHRISTABEL, The Past is Myself, Chatto & Windus, 1968

BIRKENHEAD, LORD, Halifax, Hamish Hamilton, 1965

BOHLEN, CHARLES E., Witness to History, 1929-1969, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973

BONNET, GEORGES, Fin d’une Europe, Geneva, 1948

BOURKE-WHITE, MARGARET, Shooting the Russian War, Simon 8: Schuster, New York, 1942

BOYD, CARL, Magic and the Japanese Ambassador to Berlin, Paper for Northern Great Plains History Conference, Eau Claire, Wisconsin, 1986

BUBER, MARGARETE, Under Two Dictators, Gollancz, 1949

BUBER-NEUMANN, MARGARETE, Von Potsdam nach Moskau Stationens eines Irrweges, Hohenheim, Cologne, 1981

BULLOCK, ALAN, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, Pelican, 1962

BURCKHARDT, CARL I., Meine Danziger Mission, 1937- 1939, Munich, 1960

BUTLERJ. R. M. (editor), Grand Strategy, Vols I-III, HMSO, 1956-1964

BUTSON, T. G., The Tsar’s Lieutenant: The Soviet Marshal, Praeger, 1984

CALDWELL, ERSKINE, All Out on the Road to Smolensk, Duell, Sloan and Pearce, New York, 1942

CALIC, EDOUARD, Unmasked: Two Confidential Interviews with Hitler in 1931, Chatto & Windus, 1971

CARELL, PAUL, Hitler’s War on Russia, Harrap, 1964

CASSIDY, HENRY C., Moscow Dateline, Houghton Mifilin, Boston, 1943

CECIL, ROBERT, Hitler’s Decision to Invade Russia, 1941, Davis-Poynter, 1975

CHANEY, OTTO PRESTON, JR., Zhukov, David & Charles, Newton Abbot, 1972

CHAPMAN, GUY, Why France Collapsed, Cassell, 1968

CHURCHILL, WINSTON S., The Second World War. Vol. I: The Gathering Storm, Vol. II: Their Finest Hour, Vol. III: The Grand Alliance, Penguin, 1985

CIENCIALA, ANNA M., Poland and the Western Powers, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968

CLARK, ALAN, Barbarossa, Hutchinson, 1965

COATES, W. P. and Z. K., The Soviet-Finnish Campaign, Eldon Press, 1942

COHEN, STEPHEN (ed.), An End to Silence (from Roy Medvedev’s underground magazine, Political Diary), W. W. Norton, New York, 1982

COLLIER, RICHARD, 1940 The World in Flames, Hamish Hamilton, 1979

COLVILLE, JOHN, The Fringes of Power, Downing Street Diaries, 1939-1955, Hodder & Stoughton, 1985

COLVIN, IAN, The Chamberlain Cabinet, Gollancz, 1971

CONQUEST, ROBERT, The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties, Macmillan, 1968

COOKE, RONALD C., and NESBIT, ROY CONGERS, Target: Hitler’s Oil, Kitnber, 1985

COOPER, DIANA, Autobiography, Michael Russell, 1979

COULONDRE, ROBERT, De Staline a Hitler, Paris, 1950

CRUIKSHANK, CHARLES, Deception in World War II, CUP, 1979

DAHLERUS, BIRGER, The Last Attempt, Hutchinson, 1948

DALADIER, EDOUARD, The Defence of France, Hutchinson, 1939

DEAKIN, F. W., and STORRY, G. R., The Case of Richard Sarge, Chatto 8: Windus, 1966

DEIGHTON, LEN, Blitzkrieg, Jonathan Cape, 1979

DELBARS, YVES, The Real Stalin, George Allen 8: Unwin, 1953

DEUTSCHER, ISAAC, Stalin. A Political Biography, CUP, 1949

DIETRICH, OTTO, The Hitler I Knew, Methuen, 1957

DILKS, DAVID, (ed.), Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan 1938-1945, Cassell, 1971

DJILAS, MILOVAN, Conversations with Stalin, Penguin, 1963

DOBSON, CHRISTOPHER and MILLER, JOHN, The Day We Almost Bombed Moscow: Allied War in Russia 1918-1920, Hodder & Stoughton, 1986

DOLLMANN, EUGEN, The Interpreter, Hutchinson, 1967

DONNELLY, DESMOND, Struggle for the World, Collins, 1965

DOUGLAS, CLARK, Three Days to Catastrophe, Hammond, 1966

DRAX, ADMIRAL SIR REGINALD PLUNKETT-ERNLE-ERLE-, Mission to Moscow, August 1939, Privately, 1966

DREA, EDWARD J., Nomohan: Japanese-Soviet Tactical Combat. 1939, Combat Studies Institute, Leavenworth Papers, January 1981

EDEN, ANTHONY, Facing the Dictators, Cassell, 1962

The Reckoning, Cassell, 1965

EDMONDS, H.J., Norman Dewhurst, MC, Privately, Brussels, 1968

EHRENBURG, ILYA, Eve of War, MacGibbon & Kee, 1963

EINZIG, PAUL, In the Centre of Things, Hutchinson, 1960

EISENSTEIN, SERGEI M., Immoral Memories, Peter Owen, 1985

ENGEL, GERHARD, Heeresadjutant bei Hitler 1938-1943, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt,

Stuttgart, 1974

ERICKSON,J., The Road to Stalingrad Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975

The Soviet High Command, Macmillan, 1962 ‘Reflections on Securing the Soviet Far Eastern Frontier: 1932-1945’, Interplay, August-September 1969

EUGLE, E., and PAANEN, L., The Winter War, Sidgwick 8: Jackson, 1973

FEILING, KEITH, The Life of Neville Chamberlain, Macmillan, 1946 FESTJOACHIM C., Hitler, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1974

The Face of the Third Reich, Weidenfeld 8c Nicolson, 1970

FISCHER, ERNST, An Opposing Man, Allen Lane, 1974

FLANNERY, HARRY W., Assignment to Berlin, Michael Joseph, 1942

FLEISHER, WILFRID, Volcano Isle, Jonathan Cape, 1942

FOOTE, ALEXANDER, Handbook for Spies, Museum Press, 1949, 1953

FRANCOIS-PONCET, ANDRE, The Fateful Years, Gollancz, 1949

FRANKEL, ANDREW, The Eagle’s Nest, Plenk Verlag, Berchtesgaden, 1983

GAFENCU, GRIGOIRE, The Last Days of Europe, Frederick Muller, 1947

GALANTE, PIERRE, Hitler Lives and the Generals Die, Sidgwick 8: Jackson, 1982

GARLINSKI, JOZEF, The Swiss Corridor, J. M. Dent, 1981

GIBSON, HUGH (ed.), The Ciano Diaries, 1939-1 943, Doubleday, New York, 1946

GILBERT, MARTIN, Finest Hour, Heinemann, 1983

The Holocaust, TheJewish Tragedy, Collins, 1986

Winston Churchill, The Wildemess Years, Macmillan, 1981

GISEVIUS, HANS BERND, To the Bitter End, Cape, 1948

GORALSKI, ROBERT, World War II Almanac, 1931-1945, Hamish Hamilton, 1981

GORBATOV, ALEKSANDR v., Years Of My Lips, Constable, 1964

GORODETSKY, G., Stahhrd Cripps’Mission to Moscow, 1940-42, Cambridge U.P., 1984

GREW, JOSEPH C., Ten Years in Japan, Hammond, Hammond, 1945

GREY, IAN, Stalin, Man of History, Weidenfeld 8c Nicolson, 1979

The First Fijiy Years. Soviet Russia, 1917-1967, Hodder 8c Stoughton, 1967

GRIGORENKO, PETRO G., Memoirs, Harvill, 1983 GRIPENBERG, G. A. (trs. Albin T. Anderson), Finland and the Great Powers, Univ. Of

Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1965

GUDERIAN, HEINZ, Panzer Leader, Ballantine Books, New York

GUN, NERIN E., Eva Braun, Hitler’s Mistress, Frewin, 1968

HALDER, COLONEL-GENERAL FRANZ, Kriegstagehuch, Kohlhammer, Stuttgart, 1963 Hitler als Feldherr, Miinchener Dom-Verlag, Munich, 1949

HALIFAX, LORD, Fulness of Days, Collins, 1957

HARLEYJ. H. (based on Polish by Conrad Wrzos), TheAuthentic Biography of Colonel Beck, Hutchinson, 1939

HARRIMAN, W. A., and ABEL, 13., Special Envoy to Churchill and Stalin, 1941-1946, Random House, New York, 1975

HASLAM,J., The Soviet Union and the Struggle/or Collective Security in Europe, 1933-1939, Macmillan, 1984

HAUNER, MILAN, Hitler. A Chronology of His Life and Time, Macmillan, 1983

HAYASHI, SABURO (with ALVIN D. coox), Kogun, The ]apanese Army in the Pacific War, Marine Corps Association, Quantico, Va., 1959

HEIBER, HELMUT, Goebbels, Robert Hale, 1972

HENDERSON, SIR NEVILE, Failure of a Mission, Hodder & Stoughton, 1940

HERWARTH, HANS VON (with FREDERICH STARR), Against Two Evils, Collins, 1981

HESSE, FRITZ, Das Spiel um Deutschland, List, Munich, 1953 Hitler and the English, Wingate, 1954

HESTON, LEONARD and RENATO, The Medical Case Boole of Adolf Hitler, Kimber, 1979

HILGER, GUSTAV (with ALFRED G. MEYER), The Incompatible Allies: A Memoir-History of German-Soviet Relations, 1918-1941 Macmillan, New York, 1953

HILL, LEONIDAS E. (ed.) Die Weizsacleer Papiere, 1933-1950, Berlin, 1974

HINSLEY, F. H. with THOMAS, E. E., RANSOM, C. F. G., and KNIGHT, R. (3., British Intelligence in the Second World War, Vol. 1, HMSO, 1979

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World War II History: Battle of Britain facts

Once war had broken out, Chamberlain hoped that a limited war, including the Naval blockade of Germany, would lead Hitler to negotiate or would lead to his over throw. Poland was quickly conquered by Germany, and the Soviets joined in to overrun part of it. Britain and France were determined to fight on to prevent German hegemony. This led Hitler to plan the attack on France eventually launched in May 1940. France collapsed nearly as fast as Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands and Belgium, all of which fell to Germany in early 1940. The British were driven from the Continent, although much of the British army was successfully evacuated from the beaches near Dunkirk. Britain appeared to have lost the war. Churchill replaced Chamberlain as Prime Minister in May 1940. Several leading politicians, including Chamberlain, felt it necessary to consider a negotiated peace. In May 1940 Viscount Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, was ready, if Hitler made one, ‘to accept an offer which would save the country from avoidable disaster’.

Churchill, however, was unwilling to trust Hitler and determined to light on. He successfully outmanoeuvred his rivals in the government, but the military situation was still parlous. Late 1940 and early 1941 was the nadir of Britain’s twentieth century. Isolated, apart from the crucial support of the Empire, and effectively bankrupt, she suffered further defeats with the fall of Greece to Germany in 1941. Operation Sealion, the planned German invasion of southern England, had been called off, after the German air force failed to gain air superiority over the invasion beaches in the Battle of Britain in July-September 1940. Crucial as this was, it was a victory only in that it denied Germany triumph. There was no sign that Britain was strong enough to challenge German control of the Continent. Furthermore, German pressure on Britain increased in the winter of 1940-1. The ‘Blitz’ -the bombing of Britain, that began in August 1940 and lasted until May 1941, with later less intensive, but still serious, revivals -was very damaging, and made it clear how far Britain had been pushed back onto the defensive. Cities such as Coventry, London and Southampton were devastated. Submarine attacks on British trade routes, especially the crucial supply route from North America, raised the pressure on the British economy and on food supplies. The fall of France had increased British vulnerability, as German submarines could now be based on the west coast of France. In 1941, German surface warships also attacked British trade.

The Germans also challenged Britain’s position in the Middle East. Italy under Mussolini had entered the war in 1940, and he launched attacks on British positions in East Africa and Egypt. These were swiftly checked and the Italian armies in Ethiopia and Libya were heavily defeated in early 1941. However, the Germans sent a force under Rommel that in April 1941 drove the British back into Egypt. Churchill’s future as Prime Minister was in doubt.

The total change in the situation in 1941 owed little to Britain. Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa, launched on 22 June, and his declaration of War on the USA following his ally Japan’s attack on her (and on British and Dutch colonies) that December, were what led to the defeat of Germany and Japan in 1945, German and Japanese advances in 1942 were still very serious. The British lost Hong Kong, Malaya and Burma to the Japanese. The surrender of Singapore on 15 February 1942 was a major disaster. The British had been outfought by a smaller Japanese army in the Malaya campaign, and the surrender shattered British prestige in Asia, The Germans pushed into Egypt, while German submarine attacks continued to inflict heavy losses in the Atlantic.

However, the Germans and Japanese were held in 1942 by the British in Egypt and on the India-Burma border respectively; and serious defeats were inflicted. The Americans beat the Japanese at Midway in the Pacific, the British beat the Germans at El Alamein in Egypt, the Soviets beat the Germans at Stalingrad. Germany and Japan were driven back the following year. Germany’s ally Italy was successfully invaded in 1943, followed by France, with the D-Day landings on 6 June 1944. By the end of 1944, France had been cleared. Meanwhile the Soviets advanced across Eastern Europe, and the Americans ‘island hopped’ towards Japan.

In 1945, Germany was invaded from west and east, and Hitler committed suicide in the ruins of Berlin as the Soviets captured the city. His successors were forced to surrender unconditionally. Japan was driven to the same fate by the American use of atomic bombs. Although subsequently the cause of considerable criticism, this spared the Allies (and the Japanese) the very heavy casualties that had been anticipated had Japan itself been invaded. In the closing months of the war against Japan, the British had recaptured Burma. The Allied bombing of Germany was also controversial, and doubts about its morality had been raised at the time, for example by the Bishop of Chichester. Leaving aside the moral dimension of raids, such as that on Dresden in 1945, there is also the question of Whether the heavy losses of manpower in bombing Germany was justified. At the time, however, the bombing campaign was widely seen as a return for German air attacks and also as likely to disrupt the German war effort and hit morale. There is only limited evidence for the latter, and, although the German war economy was seriously damaged by bombing, the night-time attacks on cities contributed little to this goal.

World War Two bore hard on Britain. She suffered greatly in casualties and resources. Britain lost 25 per cent of its national wealth in World War Two and was the world‘s greatest debtor nation by 1945. However, despite this, and Churchill’s participation in a series of wartime conferences of Allied leaders, the USA and the Soviet Union, not Britain, provided the crucial fighting power and economic strength to win. The degree of British financial dependence upon the USA was marked; it would become more so after the war. It has been claimed that in order to win American support, Britain surrendered her existence as an independent power and was transformed into an American satellite; although it is not clear that there was any real alternative after the defeats of 1940. It was difficult to have any confidence in the idea of negotiating with Hitler. His treatment of France in 1940, and later his seizure of the satellite state of Vichy France, was scarcely an encouraging comparison.

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German occupation of Norway and Denmark - 1940

At precisely 5.20 am German summer time on 9 April 1940, the German ministers in Norway and Denmark simultaneously handed over notes from Ribbentrop to their host Foreign Ministers, informing them that their countries were being taken under German protection for the duration of the war. This, Ribbentrop explained, was entirely the fault of the British and French, who had started everything in the first place by ‘unleashing this war of aggression, which they had long been preparing, against the German Reich and the German people’. ‘The Reich government,’ he went on, ‘has resolved, from now on, to protect and definitely assure peace in the north, with all its power, against an English-French attack.’

The form of ‘protection’ Germany had in mind involved the immediate occupation of both countries in their own interests, of course (Operation Weserübung). And since German troops would not be setting foot on Norwegian and Danish soil as enemies, Ribbentrop expected the governments and people of both countries to ‘respond with understanding to the German action, and offer no resistance to it’. Any resistance there was, he added menacingly, could only lead to unnecessary bloodshed, as the Germans would be forced to crush it.

The Danes, aware that their flat little country was completely defenceless, could only submit and watch helplessly as the German tanks and guns and troops on bicycles and horseback rolled in. The seventy-year-old King Christian had no time to flee, and decided to stay with his people. By lunchtime, it was all over: the German army had taken control of every key point and the Luftwaffe had occupied all the airfields, filling them with planes to be used against the Norwegians, should they choose to cause trouble.

The Norwegians did indeed choose to cause trouble, though they were severely hampered by having no standing army, and mobilisation notices had to be sent out by post on the morning of 9 April. Their govemment’s immediate response to the German note had been: ‘We will not submit voluntarily: the struggle is already under way.’ The outraged Ribbentrop wired back telling his minister, Curt Brauer, ‘You will once more impress on the government there that Norwegian resistance is completely senseless.’

But he was too late the mobilisation notices had been posted by the time his telegram arrived, and the king and government had already left Oslo by special train, to seek safety in the mountains. A fleet of twentythree trucks followed, carrying secret papers from ministries and the gold from the bank of Norway. Resistance had begun.

The first German casualties of the Norwegian campaign had actually occurred the day before, when one of the German transports which had set off for the northern ports on 3 April, disguised as coal ships, had been torpedoed and sunk. This was the Rio de Janeiro, a slow-moving merchant vessel, which had been carrying horses and 100 men. Many were drowned, but some were rescued from the sea by the Norwegians and taken ashore for interrogation. The submarine which scored this

notable hit was none other than the Orzel, the Polish sub which had escaped from the Germans at Gdynia and the Soviets and Estonians at Tallinn, and which was now fighting alongside the Royal Navy.

Heavier losses were inflicted on the invaders on 9 April. Approaching the Norwegian capital along the fifty-mile-long Oslo Fjord, Germany’s latest heavy cruiser, the Bliicher, was severelydamaged by the 28-cm Krupp guns of the ancient fortress of Oskarsborg, and then finished off with 40rpedoes. The brand-new 10,000-ton ship was torn apart when her ammunition blew up, and some 1,000 men lost their lives. Among them were the Gestapo officials and administrators who were to arrest and replace the Norwegian government. The rest of the force, led by the pocket battleship Liitzom (the renamed Deutschland) which had also been hit by the shore guns, turned tail and retreated ignominiously to the sea.

Further north, heading for Bergen, the cruiser Kb'nigsberg was also damaged by fire from shore batteries, and only just managed to limp into port, where she was sunk that afternoon by carrier-based Blackburn Skuas of the British Fleet Air Arm, the first large ship ever to be sunk by air attack. A British submarine accounted for another German cruiser, the Karlsruhe, just south of Kristiansand. Three more cruisers were damaged and several supply ships sunk by a fleet of sixteen British submarines which were already in the area not to prevent the German invasion, but to protect the planned Allied landings. By an astonishing piece of fortune, Hitler had beaten the British and French to it by a mere twenty-four hours! In fact, the British had started laying mines in Norwegian waters the day before, on 8 April, and so were technically the first to violate Norway’s neutrality.

But in spite of the presence of British ships in the area, the Germans still managed to occupy every one of Norway’s most important towns and cities during the morning. The valiant efforts of the shore batteries in Oslo Fjord had been in vain, for the city’s airfield had been left unprotected. At 7.30 am it was captured by a single Messerschmitt fighter, whose pilot was bold enough to land there. Others followed swiftly, taxiing into position to ring the strip so that troop transports could fly in safely. By noon, eight companies of infantry had landed, and 1,500 men were formed up behind a military band to march ceremoniously into the centre of the capital.

At 5.30 pm, General von Falkenhorst reported to Hitler: ‘Denmark and Norway occupied . . . as instructed.’ Grinning broadly, Hitler passed the news to party philosopher Alfred Rosenberg, saying, ‘Now Quisling can set up his government in Oslo.’ Vidkun Quisling, a Nazi supporter and former government minister in Norway, had in fact already started setting up shop, but was hampered by the fact that none of the German commanders had ever heard of him. His efforts to take power in the country proved to be a total failure, even with the personal support of Hitler, but he survived just long enough for his name to become an international byword for treachery.

That evening in the Chancellery in Berlin, when Hitler and his entourage sat down to a celebratory dinner, the main course of macaroni, ham and green salad was preceded on the gold-embossed menu by an appropriate hors d’oeuvre smorrebrod. The joyful F iihrer saw the occupation of Norway and Denmark itself as an hors d’oeuvre to his next great move: Operation Yellow, the assault on France and the West.

As it happened, the celebrations were slightly premature. Next day, the Royal Navy struck back at Narvik, where ten German destroyers and five troop transports had landed 2,000 mountain troops virtually unopposed. The destroyers, however, were then stuck in Narvik Fjord, for the three supply vessels which should have serviced and refuelled them had been sunk on their way from Germany. Only the tanker jam Wellem, which had come from Murmansk, had arrived, and refuelling all ten destroyers from this one tanker'was a slow business. Despite a blinding snowstorm on 10 April, five British destroyers managed to penetrate the fjord at dawn high water, 4 am, and attacked the German vessels. Three days later, they were joined by the first world war battleship, Warspz'te, and a whole flotilla of destroyers. All the German ships were sunk thus accounting for no less than half the total destroyer Strength of the German navy.

Hitler was devastated by this news, and by the fact that eleven planeloads of reinforcements for the beleaguered mountain troops had been lost when the ice gave way under them on the improvised airstrip they were using on the frozen Lake Hartvig. When he heard that British troops had actually landed near both Narvik and Trondheim, his nerve cracked and he started to panic. He ordered that any town or village in which the British set foot was to be totally destroyed, without consideration for the civilian population, and that Major-General Eduard Dietl should abandon Narvik immediately and fight his way south, with his mountain troops, to Trondheim.

General Alfred Jodl, chief of the OKW operations staff and, with Keitel, Hitler’s principal strategic adviser, was appalled by the Fuhrer’s loss of control. ‘The hysteria is frightful,’ he wrote in his diary. And he set about stiffening Hitler’s resolve. In this, he was aided by his army staff officer, Colonel Bernhard von Lossberg. Hitler’s order to Dietl, handwritten by Keitel, had already reached the OKW radio office in the Bendlerstrasse headquarters, but Lossberg refused to send it. Angrily, he complained to Keitel that it represented a loss of nerve ‘unparalleled since the darkest days of the battle of the Marne in 1914’. When he argued that securing Narvik and the iron ore supply route was the main purpose behind the entire Norwegian campaign, Keitel turned his back on him and left the room. With Jodl’s permission, Lossberg then marched off to see Brauchitsch, the Commander-in-Chief of the army, to beg him to persuade Hitler to change his mind. Brauchitsch refused.

‘I have nothing to do with the Norwegian campaign,’ he told Lossberg. ‘Falkenhorst and Dietl are answerable to Hitler alone, and I have not the slightest intention of going of my own free will into that clip joint.’

The clip joint he was referring to, of course, was the Chancellery! However, Lossberg persuaded Brauchitsch to compose another message to Dietl, congratulating him on the capture of Narvik and saying he was sure he would defend it ‘to the last man’. This was the message that was sent, while Lossberg personally tore up the Fiihrer’s order in front of Jodl and Keitel.

As the struggle for Norway wore on, with further British landings around Narvik, Hitler continued to dither and despair, and Jodl continued to prop him up. When Hitler pored over maps seeking ways of evacuation, Jodl stood over him and rapped the table with his knuckles until they showed white as he lectured him: ‘My Fuhrer, in every war there are times when the supreme commander must keep his nerve!’ Hitler stopped, pulled himself together, and carefully asked, ‘What would you advise?’ Jodl presented him with a staff evaluation of the situation, and an order which he had already drafted telling Dietl to hold out for as long as possible. Hitler signed it without demur.

The strain was still showing when Alfred Rosenberg presented him with a bust of the emperor Frederick the Great, for his fifty-first birthday on 20 April. Hitler regarded it with tears in his eyes. ‘When you see him,’ he said emotionally, ‘you realise how puny are the decisions we have to make compared with those confronting him. He had nothing like the military strength we command today.’

Walter Warlimont, Jodl’s deputy, recorded a personal impression of Hitler in those days of doubt. Arriving in his chief’s office next to Hitler’s study in the Chancellery, he found the Fiihrer ‘hunched in a chair in a corner, unnoticed and staring in front of him, a picture of brooding gloom. He appeared to be waiting for some new piece of news which would save the situation and in order not to lose a moment intended to take it on the same telephone line as the chief of his operations staff. I turned away in order not to have to look at so undignified a picture.’

Hitler’s fears were unfounded, however, for the British and French attempts to dislodge his forces from Norway were a catalogue of bungling inefficiency, their entire operation beset by confusion and indecision. With all the country’s airfields in German hands from the first day, the Allies’ hopes were always doomed. But in any case they did little to help themselves. The troops they sent were mostly inexperienced and poorly equipped even the French Alpine troops, who should have been well suited to Norwegian conditions, had no bindings for their skis. The troops who had been landed near Narvik and Trondheim were withdrawn on 2 May.

A fresh landing was made at Narvik on 28 May, with a mixed force of British, French and Polish troops among the latter was the former Polish ambassador to Berlin, Josef Lipski, serving as a private but it proved to be yet another disaster. On 7, 8 and 9June, 25,000 men were evacuated again, with heavy casualties, including the sinking of the British aircraft carrier Glorious and two destroyers. The Norwegian government fled to Britain.

Norway was secure for Hitler, but the celebrations were eclipsed by greater events elsewhere three days before the evacuation of Narvik began, the evacuation of British and French troops had been completed at Dunkirk.

The occupation of Denmark had cost Hitler only twenty casualties. But Norway had proved considerably more expensive. In addition to 1,317 men killed, 1,604 wounded and 2,375 missing or lost at sea, his already small fleet had been decimated. Three cruisers and ten destroyers were lost, two heavy cruisers and one pocket battleship were severely damaged and put out of action for several months. In the summer of 1940, apart from U-boats, the German navy was virtually non-existent, comprising only one 8-inch cruiser, two light cruisers and four destroyers, a factor of considerable importance in the war against Britain.

[genuine-history-blog]

Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov - a protégé of Joseph Stalin

Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov (Вячеслав Михайлович Молотов) was Stalin's man in every sense of the word. He had been his deputy, his henchman and often his mouthpiece since 1922, when he had been replaced by Stalin himself as executive secretary of the party's Central Committee, a position which the Georgian quickly converted into his power base as General Secretary. The two had first met before the Revolution, when Molotov was secretary to the editorial board of Pravda, the party newspaper which he had helped to establish; since then, he had given Stalin unwavering support for over twenty years as he intrigued, manoeuvred and murdered his way to dictatorship. Through all those years, Molotov was content to follow Stalin's lead: he was never a man of action but always an administrator, never seemed to have any ideas of his own, and never took a decision without consulting his master first.

Molotov was born on 9 March 1890, to well-to-do bourgeois parents. His real name was Scriabin he was the nephew of the famous composer Alexander Scriabin, and briefly studied music himself before his immersion in politics but took the pseudonym 'Molotov', meaning 'The Hammer', in 1912, at about the same time that Josef Djugashvili started calling himself 'Stalin', which means 'Man of Steel'. He had joined the Bolsheviks in 1906, had been arrested and sent into a two year exile in 1909 before going to St Petersburg to enrol at the Polytechnic, where he became the organiser of a group of Bolshevik students. At the beginning of 1912, he became a journalist, joining the staff of Zvezda (The Star), which led to his playing a leading part in setting up the new party organ, Pravda (Truth). In 1916, after escaping from the last of several further periods of imprisonment and exile, he became a member of the newly formed Central Committee in St Petersburg. From then on, he was always at or near the heart of party affairs, and in 1930, because of his unswerving loyalty to Stalin, was made Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars the official head of the Soviet government.

A man of average height and nondescript colouring, always soberly dressed in a neat grey suit and stiff white collar, rimless pince-nez glasses on his stubby nose, short arms held stiffly at his sides, Molotov looked the epitome of the faceless bureaucrat. Of all the many descriptions of him, none can ever surpass that given by Churchill, who met him many times during and after the war:

"Vyacheslav Molotov was a man of outstanding ability and cold-blooded ruthlessness . .. His cannon-ball head, black moustache, and comprehending eyes, his slab face, his verbal adroitness and imperturbable demeanour, were appropriate manifestations of his qualities and skill . . . I have never seen a human being who more perfectly represented the modern conception of a robot. . . His smile of Siberian winter, his carefully measured and often wise words, his affable demeanour, combined to make him the perfect agent of Soviet policy in a deadly world."

[genuine-history-blog]

Kliment Yefremovich Voroshilov: USSR military leader

Marshal Kliment Yefremovich Voroshilov (Климент Ефремович Ворошилов) was one of the six most important figures in the entire USSR. He had been appointed Commissar for War in November 1925, and elected to the Politburo in early 1926. His title had been changed to Commissar for Defence in 1934. He was a personal friend of Stalin - if 'friend' is the right word to describe anyone close to the Party Secretary. Certainly, they went hunting together, took holidays together at Sochi on the Black Sea, and were frequently seen in each other's company.

Born in 1881 in the Ukraine, the son of a retired railway track worker and a washerwoman, Voroshilov came from, a poor and illiterate family. At the age of eight he started work as a herdsboy, and seems to have Spent only two terms at primary school, where he learned to read and Write. This lack of a formal education was carried through into his military career, for although he rose to become one of the first marshals of the Red Army, he never received any conventional military training. Unlike many other senior officers, he had never served in the tsarist army, and as a result was often looked down on by the likes of Marshal Tukhachevsky, who once loftily observed that Voroshilov was 'not very clever, but he has at least the virtue of not trying to be clever'.

Unlike Tukhachevsky, Voroshilov survived the purges during the 1936-8 period. Although he does not appear to have been responsible for actually drawing up the lists of those officers to be arrested and shot, he certainly signed them, along with. Stalin and Yezhov, then head of the GPU (which later became the KGB). One of the first to die was Tukhachevsky - Voroshilov may well have found a certain grim pleasure in signing his death warrant.

Voroshilov's military reputation was based less on his ability as a strategist than on his legendary bravery under fire during the Civil War. Indeed, during the late 1920s, something of a personality cult grew up around him, and he was hailed as the archetypal 'worker-commander'. It says much for his talent for survival that this did not bring the wrath of Stalin on his head, although it was said he spent more time posing in the studio of Stalin's 'court' painter Gerasimov than he did attending to his job as commissar.

The delegates of the Anglo-French mission found him correct and businesslike in negotiations, and whatever his limitations may have been as a soldier, he dominated the conference, proving to be an adept tactician and a master of procedural matters. When they mingled socially, they found him charming and extremely good company, in spite of the language difficulties. It was his social face which most of the delegates saw first, for that same evening he was hosting a banquet in their honour, at the Spiridonovka.

[genuine-history-blog]

The victory of Generalissimo Stalin: World War II

The Victory which Stalin called for took a long time and great sacrifice to achieve. Just as the twenty-two months of the pact had been a monstrous chess game between the two dictators, with whole countries as the pieces, so the war became a duel to the death between the two men, using their armed forces as weapons, as each assumed personal control of his country's operations and strategy. Hitler had proclaimed himself Supreme Commander when he established the OKW in February 1938; on 19 December 1941, he also took over from Brauchitsch as Commander-in-Chief of the army. Stalin consolidated his own position in three stages becoming chairman of the newly created State Defence Committee, a body with overriding powers in all military, civil and economic matters, on 30 June; Chairman of the Stavka, a combined GHQ and high command, on 10 July; and taking over from Timoshenko as Defence Commissar on 19 July. On 8 August, he was officially named as Supreme Commander of the Soviet Union a title which later became transmuted into the one word 'Generalissimo'.

The two war lords both had a great deal to learn and both made huge mistakes and miscalculations, for which millions of their subjects paid with their lives from the very start. Stalin had misinterpreted Hitler's intentions, exposing his people to the power and savagery of the German attack without adequate preparation or protection. Hitler for his part had underestimated the size of the task he had given his armies, both in terms of the immense spaces of the Soviet Union and of the determination and toughness of the Soviet people.

Hitler had also seriously underestimated the severity of the Russian climate, or rather, his arrogant certainty that the campaign would be over in a few weeks - 'You have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down' - had led him to disregard the need to provide his soldiers with adequate protection against the Russian winter. He had tempted providence by launching his invasion on the very anniversary of Napoleon's ill-fated attack in 1812, without taking heed of the disasters which befell the French Grande Armee. Napoleon actually took Moscow before the weather forced him to withdraw. Hitler's armies reached the suburbs in the autumn of 1941, and on 16 October the city was evacuated in a great panic. But Stalin stayed put in the Kremlin, and was saved by three great Russian generals: General Mud, General Winter and finally General Zhukov.

The mud brought the first German advance to a halt in late October, when the autumn rains turned the dirt roads and indeed the whole countryside into a quagmire, bogging down men and machines and preventing supplies reaching the tanks and other tracked vehicles which could traverse the sodden terrain. With the frosts of November, the ground hardened again, and the assault on Moscow could be continued. But by then the Red Army had been able to bring up reserves and reinforcements, and to prepare the city's defences in depth.

By the time the Wehrmacht was ready to start hurling itself at Moscow again, winter was closing in. Without adequate clothing, the German troops began freezing to death. Soon, General Guderian was losing up to 1,200 men a day to frostbite, and any wounded who were not carried into cover within minutes had no hope of survival. Guns and equipment jammed as the lubricating oils froze solid. Fires had to be lit under tanks to thaw out their engines, turrets and tracks in temperatures which according to German sources plummeted to an awesome -52°C - though the Soviets dismissively say they were no worse than the 'normal' 30-40° below zero.

On 6 December, their latest assault battered to a freezing standstill by grimly determined defenders less than fifteen miles from the Kremlin itself, the Germans suddenly found themselves facing a third and even more fearsome enemy when Zhukov unleashed his great counter-attack. For five and a half months, the Wehrmacht had rampaged through the Soviet Union, killing and capturing and destroying. They had taken well over two million prisoners, more than half a million at Kiev alone, and inflicted hundreds of thousands of casualties. Although they were themselves almost exhausted they were entitled to expect that the Red Army must be at its last gasp. And yet, suddenly, they found themselves facing powerful new armies, well equipped, warmly clad, tougher even than the elite SS Panzer troops. To the reserves he had dredged up from new conscripts and the remnants of the western armies, Zhukov had been able to add massive reinforcements from the Far East, battle hardened Siberian troops to whom the Moscow temperatures seemed like a mild spring day. Japan, still smarting from the defeats inflicted upon them by Zhukov himself with these very troops, and bound by the treaty they had signed with Stalin on 13 April 1941, had decided not to enter the war against the Soviet Union, but to attack America instead. Master spy Richard Sorge, in his last coup before he was discovered and arrested in September, had informed Moscow that they had nothing to fear from the Japanese that year. Stalin had promptly transferred half the entire strength of the Far Eastern Command to the defence of Moscow, some ten rifle divisions, plus 1,000 tanks and 1,000 aircraft. Zhukov was therefore able to hit the Germans with three fresh armies made up of over a million men, including some of the toughest fighters in the world. Within three weeks he had driven the enemy back nearly a hundred miles.

'The miracle of Moscow' was Hitler's first major defeat, but the war was far from over. It was to take Stalin two years before he finally learned how to destroy Hitler's Wehrmacht, and another one and a half years after that to complete the process. In truth, however, it is doubtful whether Hitler ever had the resources to accomplish his plan. He had counted on only a short campaign, but found himself trapped in a long and bloody conflict. The riches he had sought in the Ukraine and the rest of European Russia eluded him, for in addition to Stalin's scorchedearth policy, with crops, mines and railways destroyed and dams blown, the Soviets physically moved whole industries out of the combat areas even faster than the German Panzers advanced. Between July and November 1941, a total of 1,523 complete installations, 1,360 of which were major facilities directly involved in armament production, were dismantled, transported to safety east of the Urals on the equivalent of a million and a half freight cars, and reassembled. Ten million workers were shipped out to man them. By the end of the year, the factories which Hitler had hoped to capture and turn to his own use were back in production and sending heavy tanks and other weapons to the front to join in the fight against him.

For the whole of 1942, the struggle swayed to and fro, with victories and defeats for both sides. The next major turning point came at Stalingrad, where the Red Army inflicted a second crushing defeat on the Germans in January 1943, but it was not until the Battle of the Kursk Salient, in July and August of that year, that Stalin finally gained the upper hand. Kursk, the greatest land battle in history, with some 6,300 tanks and over two million men engaged in an area only fifty miles in length and fifteen miles deep, was also the most decisive of the second world war. In the cauldron of Kursk, Hitler's Panzer strength was so badly smashed that recovery was impossible and his ultimate defeat inevitable.

Stalin had learned how to win but the cost had been truly terrible. By the time his troops raised the red flag over the ruins of Berlin on 1 May 1945, over twenty million Soviet citizens had been killed the equivalent of nine lives lost every minute of the war, 587 every hour, and 14,000 every single day. There were countless villages where not one man came back from the war. And for the Germans, the losses were proportionately almost as heavy. There are no precise figures available for German deaths related specifically to the eastern front; estimates vary from the Soviet figure of over ten million to more conservative Western figures of around five million dead and missing. For both nations, the result was a tragedy.

Hitler may have won the chess game leading from the signing of the non-aggression pact to the launch of 'Barbarossa'. But it was Stalin who emerged victorious at the end of the war as the most powerful politician in the world, While the Nazi dictator committed suicide in his bunker beneath the devastated remains of the Chancellery on 30 April 1945. And it was Stalin who determined that neither he nor his country would ever be caught unprepared again, and who extended his empire to set up a solid wall of buffer states to protect his western frontiers, behind what Winston Churchill described as 'an iron curtain' from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

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Operation Barbarossa: Stalin avoided war with Hitler

There is a legend that Stalin suffered a nervous collapse on hearing of the German invasion and hid himself away to wring his hands in a drunken stupor, wailing: 'All that Lenin created we have lost for ever!' This story was fostered by Nikita Khrushchev in 1956, as part of his campaign to shatter the icon of Stalin, which was still casting its huge shadow across party and people. But Khrushchev was far from Moscow at the time of 'Barbarossa', in Kiev. Those who were in the Kremlin, such as Colonel-General (later Marshal) N. N. Voronov, commander of Soviet anti-aircraft defences, tell a different story, recalling that Stalin was working furiously in his office during the days following the invasion, though he seemed nervy and low-spirited and attended command meetings only erratically.

It would have been understandable had Stalin collapsed. The shock of the attack must have been immense to a man whose dialectic reasoning proved 'Barbarossa' was not a rational possibility. His pact with Hitler had begun as something both dictators needed indeed, for the first year Hitler's need had been the greater, allowing Stalin to drive hard bargains in both political and economic negotiations. But Stalin clearly failed to realise that after the German victories in the West, the balance had swung the other way.

As more and more territory and resources came under his control, Hitler had become less and less dependent on Soviet supplies of grain, oil and raw materials. In any case, the high payment Stalin was exacting much of it in the shape of armaments which would be turned against Germany was increasingly unwelcome. The longer Hitler waited, the stronger Stalin would become, until he reached the point where he could choose to stop providing supplies, and at the same time cut Germany's lifeline to the Far East.

By the time of Molotov's disastrous visit to Berlin in November 1940, where his intransigence showed all too clearly that Stalin still thought he could call the tune, Hitler's confidence in the invincibility of the Wehrmacht was such that he was convinced he could take all he needed from the Soviets by force. What was more, he was eager to do so: impatient to resume his crusade against bolshevism, to smash the Soviet state for ever, and to realise his dream of taking over and colonising the Ukraine with its rich agricultural lands and industrial and mineral wealth. He had already rescinded his earlier order that deliveries to the Soviet Union were to take precedence over the requirements of the German armed forces; with the decision taken to launch 'Barbarossa', he ordered that deliveries were to stop altogether, in spite of the fact that this meant falling deeper and deeper into the red, which might arouse Stalin's suspicions.

Stalin, however, remained deliberately blind. It may be that he was simply unable to contemplate such an appalling prospect, and therefore persuaded himself it could never happen. It may be that, as he claimed, he did not believe Hitler could mount an invasion before 1942: the sheer immensity of the Soviet Union surely ruling out a Blitzkrieg, for no military commander in his right mind could imagine conquering those vast spaces in a short campaign. It would still take many more months and many more deliveries of strategic raw materials for even the Germans to build up the necessary resources and reserves for a fullscale, major war.

On that basis, it was logical to expect that Hitler would start making greater demands on the Soviet Union for the supplies he needed. And since Stalin was always a prisoner of his own logic, it was easy for him to delude himself into seeing the massive German build-up as a threat designed to extort blackmail payments, rather than genuine preparations for an immediate invasion.

Stalin was not alone in this delusion. During the final week before 'Barbarossa', several Western newspapers, notably The Times and the Manchester Guardian in Britain and the Svenska Dagbladet in Sweden, carried reports that Hitler had presented the Soviet Union with a list of demands which Stalin was at the moment considering. The precise nature of these supposed demands varied slightly from paper to paper, but they all agreed on a number of fundamental points: German insistence on the demobilisation of the Soviet western armies (some reports said of the whole Red Army); German control of the Ukraine's agricultural production; the establishment of an autonomous Ukrainian state under German control; the German take-over of Soviet shipyards in the Baltic; and lastly the right for Germany to set up war industries in Soviet territory beyond the reach of British bombers. According to the Svenska Dagbladet, betting in Budapest on the chance of a war between Germany and the Soviet Union by the end of June, which only a few days earlier had been running at odds of 5-1 on, had now dropped to even money.

These reports may well have been part of the German deception operation, intended to lull Stalin into a false sense of security by seeming to make indirect proposals through the international press a practice which Stalin himself was known to use regularly. What is equally possible, however, is that they could have been Soviet plants, following that same practice, designed to let Hitler know the sort of proposals Stalin was prepared to consider and thus encouraging him to make his demands. If that was the case, they either show the extraordinary lengths to which Stalin was prepared to go to avoid war, or they represented an attempt to draw the Germans into lengthy negotiations, never intended to succeed, which could be strung out until it was too late for an attack to be launched in 1941. In this way, Stalin would buy time and postpone the inevitable invasion at least until late spring or early summer 1942, by which time the Red Army would be better prepared. There is no firm evidence to show whether the press stories originated in Moscow or Berlin, but their nature and style is certainly consistent with Stalin's methods on many other occasions.

Whatever the truth may be, there can be no doubt that Hitler's sudden blow came as a complete surprise to the Soviet leader. His stubborn refusal to accept that Hitler might attack that summer had not only kept the frontier defences in a state of pitiful unreadiness but had also prevented the establishment of any effective High Command organisation, or the appointment of a supreme commander. For eleven days, Stalin remained out of sight to all but his closest associates, even his name conspicuously absent from directives and reports which ascribed everything to 'the Soviet government', 'the Central Committee', and 'Sovnarkom', the Council of People's Commissars, of which he was now chairman.

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Hitler's vengeance against the Yugoslavia

Yugoslavia proved a more difficult nut for Hitler to crack. Despite their deep internal divisions, the Yugoslavs were united in their desire to stay independent. They resisted the efforts of both Hitler and Stalin to persuade them to attach themselves to one or the other side. By mid-February, Hitler was resorting to threats in his efforts to draw Yugoslavia into his orbit, but still they resisted.

The heir to the throne in Yugoslavia, King Peter, had not yet come of age, and the country was ruled by his uncle, Prince Paul, as regent. Paul was himself pro-German, but had to move carefully because public opinion was heavily weighted towards the Soviets. Hitler had him brought to the Berghof in great secrecy and offered him part of Greece, including Salonika, as a bribe. But there was no agreement, and ten days later he was back to issuing even stronger threats. Finally, the Yugoslavs succumbed. The Premier and Foreign Minister were smuggled out of Belgrade to avoid the wrath of their own countrymen, slipped over the frontier in a plain car, and whisked off to Vienna, where they signed the pact and met Hitler at the Imperial Hotel, where he promised to give them Salonika, to guarantee their sovereignty and frontiers, and not to send German troops through their country. They departed for home again swearing to repay Hitler's kindness and understanding with feelings of loyalty and devotion towards Germany.

It seemed as though Hitler had won yet another trick from Stalin, since the Soviets had been outspoken in warning the Yugoslavs not to sign. He was in high spirits as he hosted a birthday dinner for Walther Hewel, Ribbentrop's liaison man in his entourage and a personal friend who had been in Landsberg prison with him back in 1923-4. Throughout the evening he joked and teased Hewel about the fact that at thirty-seven he was not yet married, signing the menu as a souvenir, 'To the peacock, from a well-wisher, Adolf Hitler'.

Before he left Vienna, he was visited by a 'Frau Wolf' his sister Paula, using his nickname as a pseudonym to cover her true identity and so avoid the unwelcome glare of reflected glory in the military hospital where she worked as a medical secretary. 'Sometimes, 'she told him, 'when I am in the mountains I see a little chapel and go in and pray for you. 'Hitler, deeply moved, replied, 'You know, I am absolutely convinced that the Lord is holding his protective hand over me.'

Hitler's triumph over Yugoslavia, however, was short-lived. The very next night there was a Coup d'état in Belgrade. Paul and his government were overthrown in a popular uprising led by senior army and air force officers. The seventeen-year-old King Peter, who escaped from his uncle's minders by climbing out of a window and sliding down a drain pipe, announced that he had ascended the throne. The new government was led by the air force chief, General Dušan Simović, who immediately refused to ratify the Tripartite Pact, and offered instead to sign a simple non-aggression pact with Germany, thus avoiding either alliance or dependence and completely ruling out all possibility of allowing German troops to cross the country. The Yugoslav people were delighted. There were wild scenes on the streets of Belgrade. Crowds demonstrated outside the German legation and destroyed the German tourist office, and the unfortunate Swedish minister, who was mistaken for a German, was attacked and beaten unconscious. Worse still, from the German point of View, Union Jacks, distributed by the British legation, were appearing everywhere, along with the Stars and Stripes of America, and many of the crowds were singing the Red Flag.

When Hitler received news of the coup at noon on 27 March, in a telegram saying the former government ministers had been arrested, he thought at first it was a joke. When he realised it was true, he flew into one of the most violent rages of his life. Screaming that he had been personally insulted, he sent for Ribbentrop, Göring, the army and Luftwaffe commanders, and for the Hungarian and Bulgarian envoys. Then he stormed through the Chancellery to the conference room where Keitel, Jodl and the adjutants were waiting for the daily briefing.

He brandished the telegram at them, 'bursting out spontaneously', as Keitel himself recalled, 'that he had no intention of standing for that: now he would smash Yugoslavia for once and for all; never mind what the new government might tell him, he had been disgracefully betrayed, and a declaration of loyalty now would only be a feint, a ploy to win time. 'He intended, he declared, to order immediate attacks on Yugoslavia from the north and east. For anyone who wanted to get to know Hitler better, his actions now provided a most revealing insight into his true character. It seemed his personal spite, his desire to punish a small nation which had dared to slight him, took precedence over the great crusade in the east. Yugoslavia must be made an example to all small states, a dire warning not to cross him...

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History of Sterling Silver Jewelry

Silver may currently be thought of as the ‘poor cousin’ of gold and platinum, especially in regards to jewelry, but that has not always been the case. In fact, antique silver jewelry is often more prized than its gold counterparts are. To fully understand the value of sliver rings, look at the history of the metal, and its role in jewelry.

Silver is known to have been mined since 4000 B.C. and been used to make jewelry almost as long. The shape of the ring itself – an unbroken circle – is a recognized symbol of prosperity and life. The luster of the sliver is often compared to moonlight, especially as it reflects upon still waters. Because of the comparison to moonlight, silver is associated with witchcraft and paganism in early history.

Pagan priestesses often wore silver rings, frequently on multiple fingers. The circle shape of the ring mimics the cyclical nature of life itself, an important point to early Pagans. Silver jewelry was also used as a sign of class and prestige.

As years went by, jewelers began to carve designs into the rings. Customers were able to place specific requests for intricate patterns, symbols or names for their rings. This way the wearer could show affiliation to a particular group, pay homage to a deity or have a physical representation of their feelings for another person. Rings are still used this way today.

During the 1300’s gemstones became a popular addition to rings. This added another element for jewelry designers, and gave clients even more ways to personalize their jewelry. However, silver rings were not always for show.

Rings with certain carvings, and often the addition of various gemstones were thought to give the rings certain magical powers. These powers were generally thought to be talismans to protect against evil forces and negative energies. Parents would hang rings over their babies’ cribs to protect them from harm.

Some rings had different engravings, ones that were more positive. These rings were believed to enhance courage, concentration, or to help the wearer achieve their goals. Interestingly, this jewelry was often passed down from mother to daughter through the generations – even if the jewelry originated with the father. This passing of jewelry was thought to keep the magic within the ring alive for future generations.

While the magic and power may not be widely believed in now, families still pass down their jewelry through the generations. These family heirlooms now carry memories and stories with them. In their own way, these memories and stories are their own form of magic.

Victorian England had a distinct impact on jewelry design, as did the Art Nouveau and Art Deco periods. The Victorians, who believed in the idea of the more elaborate the better, introduced intricate filigree. Filigree with gemstones, or filigree by itself is highly sought after in the antique jewelry market. Art Nouveau brought elements of flora and fauna into jewelry design while geometric and industrial symbols characterize the Art Deco period. The design of the ring definitely helps to determine the age of the ring.

Silver does readily show its age. In fact, many people try to avoid silver even if they like it simply because of the fact that it tarnishes. However, it is not actually the silver that tarnishes, but really an oxidation of the impurities within the silver. For this reason, it is best to look for the purest silver when shopping for silver jewelry.

An international standard is now in effect, which has helped regulate the quality of silver available. Most silver is now marked with a “925” to indicate that it is 92.5% pure. The remaining content is often nickel, copper or zinc. This additional content helps to make the silver more durable than pure silver while maintaining the original beauty of the metal.

When shopping for an antique silver ring, look for something that truly appeals to you. Jewelry should evoke a gut reaction, one that lets you know that this is the piece for you. An antique ring means you are getting a piece of history. This history has a story attached to it. Even if you never find out the story of your ring, it creates a good starting point for your own story to begin.

[genuine-history-blog]

World War II principal personalities

Famous People of World War Two

Principal personalities who caused, influenced and fought during the Second World War

GERMAN

ADOLF HITLER Führer and Chancellor of Germany 1933-45 (committed suicide, 30 April 1945) ,

JOACHIM VON RIBBENTROP Foreign Minister 1938-45 (hanged at Nuremberg, 16 October 1946)

FIELD MARSHAL WALTHER VON BRAUCHITSCH Army Commander-in-Chief 1938-December 1941 (retired after severe heart attack; died in British captivity, 1948)

VICE-ADMIRAL WILHELM CANARIS Chief of the Abwehr, the OKW intelligence service, 1935-44 (hanged by the Nazis, April 1945, for complicity in assassination attempt on Hitler)

DR JOSEPH GOEBBELS Minister of Propaganda 1933-45 (committed suicide in Hitler's bunker, 30 April 1945)

REICHSMARSCHALL HERMANN GORING Minister for Air 1933-45, President of Reichstag, Luftwaffe Commander-in-Chief 1935-45, Head of Four Year Plan (committed suicide at Nuremberg, 1946)

GENERAL HEINZ GUDERIAN Panzer commander, inventor of Blitzkrieg

COLONEL-GENERAL FRANZ HALDER Army Chief of Staff 1938-42 (imprisoned in concentration camp for anti-Hitler activities, rescued from execution 4 May 1945 by US troops)

HANS 'JOHNNIE' VON HERWARTH Second secretary, German embassy in Moscow 1931-39 (escaped detection as member of the assassination plot against Hitler, 20 July 1944; first ambassador in London for German Federal Republic, 1955-61, head of Presidential Office, Bonn, 1961-5, ambassador in Rome 1965-9)

RUDOLF HESS Deputy Führer until flight to Britain, 1941 (sentenced to life imprisonment at Nuremberg; died in captivity, 1987)

WALTHER HEWEL Ribbentrop's personal liaison man with Hitler 1938-45

LIEUTENANT-GENERAL ALFRED JODL Chief of operations staff, OKW, 1939-45, Hitler's closest military adviser (hanged at Nuremberg, 16 October 1946)

GRAND ADMIRAL ERICH RAEDER Navy Commander-in-Chief 1935-43 (sentenced to life imprisonment at Nuremberg; died in captivity, 1960)

PAUL OTTO SCHMIDT Chief interpreter, Foreign Ministry, 1923-45, head of secretariat 1935-45

DR KARL SCHNURRE Head of Eastern Europe section, Foreign Ministry economic policy department, principal economic negotiator 1938-45

COUNT FRIEDRICH WERNER VON DER SCHULENBURG Ambassador in Moscow 1934-41 (executed by Nazis for complicity in 20 July assassination plot, 1944)

MAJOR-GENERAL WALTER WARLIMONT Deputy to Jodl in OKW 1939-45

BARON ERNST VON WEIZSACKER State Secretary in the Foreign Ministry 1938-43; ambassador to the Holy See 1943-45 (tried and acquitted at Nuremberg; released 1949; died 1951)

SOVIET

JOSEF V. STALIN General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union 1922-53, Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (Prime Minister) 1941-53 (died of cerebral haemorrhage, 5 March 1953)

VYACHESLAV M. MOLOTOV Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (Prime Minister) 1930-41, Foreign Commissar 1939-49 (expelled from Communist Party 1964, reinstated July 1984; died peacefully 8 November 1986, aged 96)

GEORGI A. ASTAKHOV Counsellor of embassy, Berlin, 1938-41 (died in Soviet prison camp at Komi, late 1941)

EVGENY BABARIN Deputy head of Soviet trade delegation in Berlin 1938-41

VALENTIN M. BEREZHKOV Interpreter for Molotov on November 1940 visit to Berlin; first secretary, Berlin embassy, December 1940 June 1941

VLADIMIR G. DEKANOZOV Ambassador to Berlin 1940-41, previously head, of foreign affairs for NKVD and Deputy Foreign Commissar (purged December 1953 and executed)

LIEUTENANT-GENERAL (later Marshal) FILLIP I. GOLIKOV Stalin's intelligence chief 1940-41

ADMIRAL NIKOLAl G. KUZNETsov Naval Commissar 1939-53

MAXIM M. LITVINOV Foreign Commissar 1930-39, chief of foreign affairs information, Central Committee of CPSU, 1939-41; ambassador to Washington 1941-3

IVAN M. MAISKY Ambassador to London 1932-43

ALEXEI MEREKALOV Ambassador to Berlin 1938-9

ANASTAS I. MIKOYAN Trade Commissar 1926-64 (President of the Soviet Union, 1964-5; died peacefully in retirement, October 1978)

VLADIMIR P. POTEMKIN Deputy Foreign Commissar 1937-45

MARSHAL BORIS S. SHAPOSHNIKOV Army Chief of Staff 193 7-40, 1941-2

MARSHAL SEMEN K. T IMOSHENKO Defence Commissar 1940-1

MARSHAL KLIMENT Y. VOROSHILOV Defence Commissar 1926-40 (President of the Soviet Union 1953-60; died peacefully in retirement, 3 December 1969)

ANDREI Y. VYSHINSKY First Deputy Foreign Commissar 1940-6 (Soviet representative at UN, 1946-54; died peacefully 1954)

ALEXANDER S. YAKOVLEV Leading aircraft designer, Deputy Commissar for the Aircraft Industry 1940 onwards

ANDREI A. ZHDANOV Secretary Leningrad Communist Party, member of Politburo, Chairman of Foreign Affairs Commisssion, President of Naval Soviet (died 1948)

GENERAL (later Marshal) GEORGI K. ZHUKOV Chief of Staff JanuaryJuly 1941, the Soviet Union's most successful and most decorated commander (Defence Minister 1955-7; died peacefully in retirement 1974)

BRITISH

NEVILLE CHAMBERLAIN Prime Minister 1937-40

WINSTON CHURCHILL First Lord of the Admiralty 1939-40, Prime Minister 1940-45

ANTHONY EDEN Minister of War May-December 1940, Foreign Secretary 1935-38, December 1940-45

VISCOUNT (later EARL) HALIFAX Foreign Secretary 1938-40, ambassador to Washington 1940-45

ADMIRAL THE HON. REGINALD PLUNKETT-ERNLE-ERLE-DRAX, ADC to King George VI, leader of Allied military mission to Moscow 1939

SIR NEVILE HENDERSON Ambassador to Berlin 1937-9

ROBERT HUDSON Secretary to Department of Overseas Trade 1937-40

GENERAL (later Field Marshal Lord) SIR EDMUND IRONSIDE Inspector General of Overseas Forces 1939, Chief of the Imperial General Staff 1939-May 1940, Commander-in-Chief Home Forces May - July 1940

SIR WILLIAM SEEDS Ambassador to Moscow 1939-41

WILLIAM STRANG Head of Central Department, Foreign Office

SIR HORACE WILSON Chief Industrial Adviser to Chamberlain

FRENCH

EDOUARD DALADIER Prime Minister April 1938-March 1940

PAUL REYNAUD Prime Minister May-June 1940

GEORGES BONNET Foreign Minister April l938-September 1939

CAPTAIN ANDRE BEAUFRE Assistant to air force representative in military mission to Moscow, 1939

ROBERT COULONDRE Ambassador to Moscow l936-October 1938, to Berlin November l938-September 1939

GENERAL JOSEPH DOUMENC Leader of French delegation in military mission to Moscow, 1939

PAUL NAGGIAR Ambassador to Moscow 1939-41

ITALIAN

BENITO MUSSOLINI Founder of the Fascist party, head of government and Prime Minister 1922-43

COUNT GALEAZZO CIANO Foreign Minister l936-February 1943, son in-law of Mussolini (executed for attempting to overthrow Mussolini, 1943)

BERNARDO ATTOLICO Ambassador to Berlin l935-May 1940

FINNISH

MARSHAL CARL GUSTAV VON MANNERHEIM Commander-in-Chief 1939-44 (President 1944-6)

ELJAS ERKKO Foreign Minister 1938-9

JUHO PAASIKIVI Leader of delegation to Moscow, 1939 (Prime Minister 1918, 1944-6, President 1946-56)

VAINO TANNER Finance Minister 1938-9, Foreign Minister 1939-41

JAPANESE

YOSUKE MATSUOKA Foreign Minister July l940-July 1941

GENERAL HIROSHI OSHIMA Military attache in Berlin 1936-8, ambassador November 1938-October 1939, February 1941-May 1945

POLISH

COLONEL JOSEF BECK Foreign Minister l932-September 1939

MARSHAL EDWARD SMIGLY-RYDZ Inspector-General of the army, 1936-9

JOSEF LIPSKI Ambassador to Berlin 1934-9

COUNT EDWARD RACZYNSKI Ambassador to London 1934-45 (later President of govemment-in-exile)

SWEDISH

BIRGER DAHLERUS Swedish businessman, friend of Giiring, unofficial emissary to London 1939

SWISS

CARL J. BURCKHARDT League of Nations High Commissioner in Danzig 1937-9

[genuine-history-blog]

Introductory Guide To Victorian Silver Antiques

Victorian-era silver antiques are fun to collect because many manufactures produced a wide assortment of items to fit the needs and budgets of almost everyone who lived in the U.K. during that time. As a result, it is lots of fun to learn about Victorian-era silver antiques.

To get you started, here is an introductory guide about Victorian silver antiques. The first part of the guide gives readers a rough idea of what types of silver objects were produced during the Victorian Era. The second part of the guide gives readers an idea about some of the famous hallmarks that can help today’s collectors identify different pieces. Finally, the guide also gives readers an idea of what sorts of pieces make good long-term investments.

Hopefully, readers can use this guide as a springboard to start off their own quests to learn more about these fascinating pieces of British history!

The Victorian Era features many silver objects that were practical to use as well as fun to look at. As you may know, the Victorian Era brought great social and technological changes to the United Kingdom. People can learn a lot about these changes by studying some of the silver objects that were created during this time.

With this idea in mind, here is a brief look at some of the most popular silver items that were manufactured in the U.K. during the Victorian Era: Household objects such as mirrors, hair brushes, tea pots, punch bowls and flatware feature simple but beautiful designs.

These objects were usually made out of sterling silver or sometimes silver plate. They featured lovely patterns and ample proportions to create very simple but pretty objects that were useful. Today’s collectors can enjoy owning these items by looking for items from the Robert Wallace and Son Company, the Daniel & John Wellby Company and others. Don’t forget to also look for other items such as silver boxes, jewelry belt buckles and other knick-knacks.

The Victorian Era also ushered in a time where manufacturers could create silver items that served as fobs. These items were fun to look at but didn’t really serve a practical purpose. Today’s collectors can have fun collecting silver items such as boxes, ornamental belt buckles, thimbles and other knick-knacks that feature richly ornate designs, free-flowing curves and a wide assortment of sizes and shapes. These items were usually made by many smaller manufacturers out of either sterling silver or silver plate.

The Victorian Era also features many hallmarks that can help collectors identify certain pieces from makers.

Hallmarks are tiny symbols that have been punched into an object made out of a precious metal. They were used to tell people where the object was made, who made it, and how much precious metal content is in the piece.

The best Victorian-era silver antiques to invest in are pieces made out of sterling silver in top condition. This is true because they appeal to many more collectors than silver-plated pieces or pieces that have scratches or dings on them. This is especially true for jewelry items and for household items such as tea sets and flatware because small scratches tend to make these pieces look unattractive to most buyers. As a result, try to find and purchase only top-quality Victorian-era silver antiques that are made out of sterling silver for investment purposes. These items will always be in demand by savvy collectors who appreciate the beauty and rarity of these pieces. They might be a bit more costly than run-of -the mill silver plate pieces but their long-term investment value makes them a better choice for collectors who want to invest in items that look wonderful and have an interesting history attached to them.

[genuine-history-blog]

Hitler and Stalin never met

Hitler and Stalin never met. Many commentators and historians have speculated on the possibility that had they done so they would have reached an understanding, and the war between their countries might have been avoided. Such wishful thinking ignores the fact that both men were prisoners of the systems which they had themselves created, prisoners of their own totalitarian philosophies, prisoners, too, of history.

The animosity between Germany and Russia stretches back over the centuries to a time before either of them existed as a nation. It is rooted in the rivalry between the two dominant racial groups in the central and eastern European landmass: Teutons and Slavs. When the early Slavs swept westwards as far as the river Elbe in the fifth century AD, it was a Teutonic tribe, the Goths, who gave them their name by calling them Slavan, meaning silent. The Slavs, for their part, called the Teutonic tribes Niemcy, meaning mute. For much of the time since then, communication between the two groups has been a dialogue of the deaf, if not the dumb.

Despite sometimes long periods of quiescence, the basic antagonism between the two races continued over the centuries from pre-history to modern days. During this time, the Teutons developed an unshakeable belief in their innate superiority; they were convinced they were the sole fount of all civilisation in the region. The inferior Slavs were incapable on their own of building cities, forming states or creating true culture: everything they had which was worthwhile had been achieved by or with the help of Germans.

The Germans had carried their culture with them when they pushed out to the east, sometimes peacefully, sometimes by force. The Teutonic Knights conquered Prussia and Lithuania by the sword; German merchants had brought trade, prosperity and stability to the Baltic;

German administrators had helped the tsars to run their empire; German settlers had developed the agriculture of great areas of Russia as far east as the Volga. During the nineteenth century there were literally millions of Germans farming Russian land even at the end of the century, when their numbers had declined considerably, there were still some 1,800,000 ethnic Germans, Volksdeutsche, living in Russia outside the Baltic provinces. For the most part, they made no attempt to assimilate, but remained proudly and obstinately German, generally living in closed communities.

Along with their contempt for what they regarded as a backward people, however, the German nation also had a constant fear of being overrun by them. By the beginning of the twentieth century, tsarist Russia had a population of 170 million, while Germany had only 65 million, and the gap was growing wider all the time, for the Slav birthrate was three times that of the Germans. Hitler himself called them ‘an inferior race that breed like vermin”. With no natural frontiers, and therefore no physical barriers in the central landmass, the threat they posed seemed very real.

Otto von Bismarck, who united the German states into one nation in 1871, based his foreign policy on maintaining an understanding with Russia. But this was rooted in fear rather than friendship, expediency rather than expectancy. Kaiser Wilhelm II, who removed Bismarck from office in 1890, did not understand the ‘Iron Chancellor’s” policies, and allowed the relationship to sour. As a result, in 1914, Germany was faced with a war on two fronts, and although the Russians lived up to the poor estimation of their military capabilities, the effort needed to defeat them was a major factor in Germany’s eventual downfall. Had the Russians been stronger, they could have swept across the plains and descended on Berlin like a horde of modern-day Mongols while the bulk of the German army was locked in combat with the French and British. The nightmare would have come true. As it was, it remained to haunt the German generals with the dread that no matter how much they despised the Russians, one day, inevitably, through sheer force of numbers they would be strong enough.

When tsarist Russia became the Soviet Union, the fear of bolshevism was added to the old radical anxieties. Although the military threat had collapsed, at least for the moment, there was now the danger that a weakened Germany could be fatally infected with this bacillus from the east. In 1917, though, the immediate need to remove Russia from the war far outweighed such worries, and the Germans even played their part in assisting the Bolshviks by allowing Lenin to return home across their territory.

The German leaders, however, had no intention of allowing Lenin and his associates to enjoy the fruits of their bloody revolution. Their intention was to take the opportunity of splitting up the old Russian empire into smaller, and therefore weaker, parts. Indeed, they eagerly signed a separate peace treaty in early February 1918 with the Ukraine, which, with active German encouragement, had already declared its independence. After finally signing a peace treaty with the Soviet government at Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, the Germans went on to recognise the independence of Georgia, and the Kaiser sent a message to the leader of the Don Cossacks outlining his plans for the ultimate partitioning of Russia into four independent states: the Ukraine, the Union of the South-East, Central Russia and Siberia’, together with puppet grand duchies to be set up in the Baltic states.