losing none of their patriotism for that reason.
But the European Jews had also excelled in revolution. In Hungary, in Russia, in Germany itself, Jews were at the forefront of the revolutionaries. The regime in Hungary, led by the Jewish Bela Kun, had 25 of 32 of its commissars Jewish; in Germany, Rosa Luxemberg, Eisner, Toller, Levine were Jewish: five of the seven leaders of the Bavarian revolution were Jewish; in Russia Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Litvinov were Jews, and Lenin had some Jewish ancestry. The great and unforgivable fault of the Jews, their Achilles heel, was that they seemed to excel in everything, for good or ill, in revolution or stable government, in extortion or religion, as criminals or lawyers, as well as mathematicians and scientists. They could thus be accused of being at the heart of virtually anything you wished. For this dangerous excellence German Jewish scholars were expelled from their posts in the German academic world.
With this extraordinary measure the popular dictator gained his revenge, satisfied his constituents, and imperilled his nation. The nature of Nazism was unveiled to the wide world, the implacable antagonism of a gifted group was aroused, and the powers of the west were stirred from their dreams of peace and security. A historian in the fourth millennium, pursuing his dusty and obscure researches into the long vanished world of the second world war, might, amid the crimes which will undoubtedly stain the third, be less surprised by those of the second millennium; but his incredulity will surely be aroused by the deliberate rejection or exile of a scientific community, which constituted Germany’s strength in peace and war, by a leader who was very well aware of the value of technically superior weapons31. A more ruthless and cynical man might have dissembled his hatred, and attracted as many scientists or technologists as he could – what could a more stupid man have done?
Thus the growing scientific community at Peenemuende continued their clandestine researches while the potential of the wider scientific base around them, although still large, was contracted. Abstract science, from which new technologies grow, was scorned; national socialist science and technology, under the pressure of war and defeat, would gradually turn to an enchanted world of heroic self sacrifice and gigantism, where salvation seemed to lie in child warriors who would pilot flying bombs or powered gliders against modern bombers, or in tanks weighing 120 tons, or in wooden jet fighters or rocket aeroplanes which would glide back to earth after each mission. As this lurid glow gradually penetrated the gloom of defeat which fell over the Third Reich as the second world war progressed, the liquid fuelled rocket would seem more and more promising, not as a battlefield weapon, but as a bringer of retributive terror.
PART II
‘I will have such revenges on you both
That all the world shall, – I will do such things, –
What they are yet I know not; but they shall be
The terrors of the earth.’
From William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act 2, Scene IV
On September 1st 1939, Germany invaded Poland. Britain and France declared war, but could do little else to help the Poles. German armoured forces penetrated rapidly and deeply behind the lines of the brave, but antiquated, Polish army. The Polish air force was annihilated in days. German aircraft ranged over Poland at will, hitting cities and troops with demoralising impunity. On September 17th, the Soviet army, in accordance with the secret terms of the Nazi – Soviet pact the preceding month, re – occupied eastern Poland, which the Poles had wrested from them in the war of 1920. Poland was crushed.
Hurrying behind the German forces came seven ‘Einsatzgruppen’, Reichsfuehrer Heinrich Himmler’s death squads, who sought out the Polish aristocrats, priests and intelligentsia, as well as the hapless Jews, for slaughter. There was no treaty. Poland was simply absorbed by her conquerors, and Polish troops were to continue fighting in western armies until the end of the war, while at home the Polish underground began a long struggle, conducted with unbelievable gallantry. They would play a notable part in the defeat of the ‘V’ weapons.
On April 9th 1940 Germany began her attack on Norway; however despite British and French naval and military assistance, it was conquered by June. Denmark was attacked at the same time, the Danish government ordering a ceasefire less than two hours later. These conquests were a preliminary to the most dramatic military debacle of the twentieth century. Bad weather had caused a German attack on France to be postponed several times. In January 1940 a German officer mistakenly landed in Belgium, where he was interned. He had with him documents detailing German plans for the offensive, and it was not known whether he had managed to destroy them1. The plans were therefore altered. The new plans were more daring.
France, Holland, Belgium and Luxemburg were invaded on May 10th. Parachutists landed on the roof of the great Belgian fortress of Eban Emael, which was neutralised, and captured by advancing forces later. German panzer divisions, composed of tanks, self propelled guns and motorized infantry, using a strategy propounded by Sir Basil Liddell Hart, burst through the French front in the Ardennes mountains, which were thought to be impassable to tanks. They were the steel tip of a wedge of some fifty divisions.2 Penetrating deeply to the rear of the British and French armies, which had, as the Germans had expected, swung into Belgium to meet the German advance there, they rapidly reached the Channel coast, to the consternation of both the allies and the German high command itself, which was fearful of a counterstroke.
Columns of refugees streamed westwards along the French roads, hampering military movement. Both refugees and soldiers were harassed by swarms of dive-bombers, the famous Stukas, which were fitted with sirens, and their bombs with screaming whistles, to add to the terror. All around was confusion. No sooner did the position of the German forces seem to have been established than the information became outdated. Rumour and chaos led to panic, and panic led to demoralisation. It was a game of chess, with the allies blindfolded by German air superiority and their own panic and confusion, in which the Germans, fighting a new, faster, more mechanised war, seemed to have three moves to the allied one.
When the Germans reached the channel coast, their commanders wanted to hurl their forces at the British, who were attempting to establish a defence perimeter around the port of Dunkirk in order to facilitate their withdrawal to their home islands. But General (later field Marshal) Gerd von Rundstedt (1875-1953) was concerned about the wear on his armoured forces, which might have to respond to a French attack from the Aisne. Goering had promised Hitler that the Luftwaffe could finish off the British army, which was strung out on the open beaches; furthermore, the high command, remembering the Great War, were wary of their armoured forces being bogged down in the marshes of Flanders. Hitler accordingly stopped his tanks just short of Dunkirk, in one of the most fateful decisions of the war. Whether this decision owed anything to his admiration for the British, his desire for an alliance with them, and his wish not to humiliate them, is one of history’s deepest mysteries. The British army owed much to the gallantry of the French defence at Lille, which occupied German troops and attention; to the Belgians, whose bravery won the admiration of the Germans; to the Royal Air Force, which fought at odds in the sky over the beaches; and to the Royal Navy, to whose courage and organisation the survivors owed their return home.
The
