Category Archives: military

by | 24 December 2025 · 3:54 am

Eisenhower’s Command, 7 May 1945

From Victory ’45: The End of the War in Eight Surrenders, by James Holland and Al Murray (Grove Atlantic, 2025), Kindle pp. 145-148:

US ARMY GENERAL DWIGHT D. ‘IKE’ EISENHOWER was where the buck stopped. And it was one hell of a buck. Because the buck stopped with Ike not just for his fellow countrymen, not just for the US Army, but for all of the Allied armies in Europe. He had his masters in Washington – who in the wake of the death of President Roosevelt on 12 April were in some disarray – and in London, but he also had his subordinates, millions of them.

SHAEF HQ itself reflected the size of the task Eisenhower had undertaken, numbering 16,000 personnel, the same kind of strength as an entire division. Aided and abetted by senior officers from the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force, Ike was at the centre of the Allied effort. These senior officers helped to carry the load, but it was Ike alone who had the ultimate responsibility.

His armies were as numerous and vast as they were diverse. Under his command were three army groups: US 12th Army Group comprising the First, Third, Ninth and Fifteenth Armies, twelve corps, containing forty-eight divisions, 1.2 million men under General Omar Bradley; US 6th Army Group with the French First Army and US Seventh Army commanded by General Jacob L. Devers, a comparatively small 700,000 men in forty-seven different armoured and infantry divisions; as well as 21st Army Group under Montgomery – the DUKEX contingent of 1,020,581 officers and men at its height – comprising the Canadian First Army and British Second Army, with additional Polish and Czech elements; First Allied Airborne Army with its seven airborne divisions, Special Air Service brigades and troop transport aircraft. He also commanded the RAF Second Tactical Air Force and US Ninth Air Force, and for the run of OVERLORD had had command of strategic air forces too. No soldier had ever commanded armies so numerous, wielded so much power, or been of so much consequence. He had the ultimate power of life and death over his men, though only one, Eddie Slovik, had faced the firing squad for desertion. Armies this large, this complex, competing among themselves for resources, priority, victory, were necessarily engines of friction, and it was Ike’s task to run it all as harmoniously as possible. Eisenhower was the twentieth-century warlord supreme, the reach and scale of his power only to be eclipsed by the imminent arrival of the atomic age.

Eisenhower therefore didn’t just shoulder the burden of his immediate infuriating, frustrating subordinates, the American generals and the British Field Marshal who could, in arguing so passionately when making their cases for how the war should be fought and won, drive him to distraction. By the spring of 1945 he had a million more subordinates. Of course, not all were men at arms; the Allies had a vast logistical network behind them because they were fighting every step as an expeditionary force, but Eisenhower bore the weight of this responsibility. They were all answerable to him; he was answerable to his bosses.

Death was at the core of every decision he made, for his own men, for the enemy and for the civilians in between. Every opportunity taken or ignored centred on death, slaughter, destruction. Every moment that delayed the war, every hesitation offered the prospect of more death. Ike considered Napoleon’s approach to leadership as something to aspire to: ‘The great leader, the genius in leadership, is the man who can do the average thing when everybody else is going crazy.’ Self-control, harnessing his temperament to the task in hand, was Eisenhower’s key to managing himself while he managed everyone else. He felt sure too that whatever pressure he might be under, there was someone worse off: ‘The most terrible job in warfare is to be a second lieutenant leading a platoon when you are on the battlefield.’ Ike shared none of the pressures of the subaltern in the foxhole or slit trench; his were of a different order. They were political rather than military.

If anyone was to take the surrender on the Western Front, it would be Ike. He was the tip of the spear: he symbolized the Allied effort, warts and all. And this was why, once Monty had got von Friedeburg’s signature on the Lüneburg document, he, for all the accusations of ego and glory-hunting he faced, had passed the question of the larger surrender immediately on to his boss. It would have been impossible, and indeed out of character, for him to do otherwise.

And yet when the moment came, when Generaloberst Alfred Jodl signed the ‘Instrument of Military Surrender’ at 2.41 a.m. on 7 May 1945, Ike was absent. Rather than witness the German capitulation, as Monty had done, gleefully briefing reporters and dressing down the Germans sent to parlay with him, Eisenhower had instead decided that he would have nothing to do with the emissaries of the new Führer, that Dönitz’s men were Nazis like Hitler’s, and that was the end of it. Just as he had ignored General Hans-Jürgen von Armin when the Germans capitulated in Tunisia, so he would shun them again. As Ike saw it, this new government in Flensburg was no more legitimate than Hitler’s in Berlin had been, and no more entitled to try to dictate terms in the ruins of Germany than its predecessor.

Rather than treat with the Germans, he would leave it to his staff to handle them, get them to sign, dominate them in person and dictate terms. Ike – the diplomat soldier supreme within the coalition – had no appetite for any diplomacy with the enemy. On arrival at Eisenhower’s HQ, everyone on the Allied side divined that Jodl had been hoping to stall things for at least another twenty-four hours so that he could surrender not to the Soviets but the Allies, and buy more time for German formations to flee west and avoid the Red Army’s righteous fury. Ike’s staff were having none of it; they knew their chief believed in unconditional surrender, and they believed in their chief. If he was going to cold-shoulder the Germans at the moment of their surrender and add to their humiliation, then his staff were going to help him with it.

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by | 23 December 2025 · 10:56 pm

Liberating Slave Labor Camps

From Victory ’45: The End of the War in Eight Surrenders, by James Holland and Al Murray (Grove Atlantic, 2025), Kindle pp. 135-136:

The 3rd Infantry Division might have been first to Berchtesgaden, first to be able to crawl over the Berghof and first to reach the dizzy 6,000-foot heights of the Kehlsteinhaus, but they were not allowed to remain for long. Colonel Heintges had expected to be there for at least a week, but the following day the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment reached the town, part of the 101st ‘Screamin’ Eagles’ Airborne Division, and much to Heintges’ disappointment the Cottonbalers were relieved, while Leclerc’s men moved in on the Obersalzberg.

Yet while capturing Nazis and vast numbers of German troops was very much the Allies’ ongoing mission and a key part of securing Germany’s surrender, so too was liberating the astonishing number of concentration and forced labour camps. Nordhausen, a vast slave labour camp that fed workers into the Mittelbau-Dora factory where the V-2s had been manufactured, had been liberated on 11 April. The stench had been so bad that the American and British liberators had nearly all started vomiting. Buchenwald had been liberated the same day. A few days later, on 15 April, British troops had reached Bergen-Belsen, where tens of thousands of Jews had been left to starve. The arrival of Allied troops at these places of human degradation, misery and death was a watershed moment. Most found it hard to comprehend that fellow humans could be treated with such untold cruelty. Photographs and film footage of skeletal survivors, but also of piles of dead between the disease-infested huts, were quickly shown around the free world and prompted understandable feelings of shock, outrage and, of course, revulsion against the people responsible for this. It was hardly surprising that feelings towards the Germans hardened further; the enemy had continued fighting long after Germany had lost the war. Needless lives had been lost. Anger had already been rising among Allied troops, who saw no reason why they should risk their lives in this pointlessness. Now they were coming across scales of inhumanity that few could comprehend. Anger, disgust, horror and diminishing compassion for a subjugated enemy were the feelings aroused in many of the liberators.

And there were just so many camps. Every day Allied troops reached another, invariably presaged by the noticeable absence of birdsong and the rising stench that filled the air. On 4 May, the same day that Lieutenant Sherman Pratt and his men reached the Obersalzberg, it was the turn of the 71st ‘Red Circle’ Infantry Division. In sharp contrast to the battle-hardened 3rd Infantry Division, the 71st was one of the newest units to arrive in the ETO, landing in France only on 6 February 1945 and not heading into combat until early March. They’d seen plenty of action since then, however, and done well too, first attached to Patch’s Seventh Army and then moved to join Patton’s Third Army as it swept on into Austria and Czechoslovakia on the northern flank of 6th Army Group. And it was into Upper Austria, on the road to Hitler’s home city of Linz, that the Red Circle Division came across the horrifying site of Gunskirchen Lager.

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Filed under Austria, Britain, disease, Germany, industry, labor, military, slavery, U.S., war

by | 23 December 2025 · 4:02 am

Forging Ahead for the Postwar

From Victory ’45: The End of the War in Eight Surrenders, by James Holland and Al Murray (Grove Atlantic, 2025), Kindle pp. 52-54:

While, on the face of it, Wolff appeared to be one step ahead of Kaltenbrunner in his contacts with the Allies, the RSHA chief had been stockpiling immense amounts of cash for a post-war world in which money could well buy him out of trouble. Twenty miles north-west of Bolzano, down a long Alpine valley, lay Merano, a small spa town popular before the war for its mountain sports, which had been home to a number of Jews, most of whom had since been arrested and deported. Since early the previous year, it had also been the headquarters of an outrageous money-laundering operation. In fact, there were warehouses next to Merano’s racecourse now stuffed with boxes full of counterfeit British and US banknotes.

The location of Merano – between Innsbruck and Austria to the north, Switzerland to the east, and with Verona, Lake Garda and Bologna all as local satellites – made the town the ideal place from which to run a money-laundering operation. To launder money, the ability to distribute it and spread it to the four winds was essential, but equally important was to keep the enterprise away from too many prying eyes. Kaltenbrunner was mostly in Berlin, but Merano was surrounded by mountains and isolated. Here another of his creatures could mastermind the entire operation with comparative impunity.

Forging British banknotes had originally been devised by the SD back in 1940, although the counterfeiters initially struggled and by the time of Heydrich’s assassination in Prague in June 1942 the operation had already been wound down. Under Kaltenbrunner, however, counterfeiting British notes was revived as Operation BERNHARD. The aim was no longer to flood the British economy but rather to use the money to finance secret intelligence operations. And this time the counterfeiters were of an entirely higher calibre: Jewish prisoners at Sachsenhausen concentration camp to the north of Berlin who were superb at the art of forging banknotes. By 1943, some 140 prisoners were producing tens of millions of pounds’ worth of notes from six flat-bed printing presses. By May 1944, Kaltenbrunner ordered them to start producing US dollars as well, not exactly for intelligence operations but for his own personal use, whether that might be a last stand in the Alpine redoubt – certainly his cover story – or, more realistically, to accumulate a vast private fund for a rainy post-war day.

Running the laundering of this extraordinary counterfeiting operation was another unscrupulous rogue called Friedrich Schwend, part of the mosaic of corruption, criminality and deceit that marked the Nazi regime. Like Kaltenbrunner, Schwend had been only too willing to cast ideology aside in favour of looking after number one and was proving adept at adapting his skills to self-preservation. Schwend was thirty-eight, a former pre-war car engine salesman and a smooth-talking charmer who had been working for the Abwehr, the Wehrmacht’s intelligence service – rather than the SS-run RSHA – at the start of the war. Repeatedly getting himself into trouble, he was caught out by his superiors selling unauthorized but bogus German U-boat plans to the British for cash, captured by Italian secret intelligence agents, turned back over to the Germans at the Brenner Pass and flung in prison at Klagenfurt in the Austrian Alps.

Kaltenbrunner learned about Schwend from none other than Wilhelm Höttl, who suggested this canny rogue as just the man for overseeing a money-laundering operation. That Schwend had fallen foul of the Abwehr was no disqualification for working for Kaltenbrunner; quite the opposite, in fact. Releasing Schwend from his incarceration, the RSHA boss instructed him to run the entire laundering operation of forged banknotes, giving him, frankly, astonishing levels of latitude so long as he successfully and swiftly spread the notes as far and wide as possible. Incredibly, Schwend even negotiated for himself a 33.33 per cent cut of every pound sterling he brought into circulation.

In very swift order, Schwend established his small operation under the entirely fake name of ‘Stab. 4 Deutsches Panzerkorps’, initially at Abbazia and Trieste before realizing that Merano offered a considerably better, more discreet location. Taking over the Schloss Labers, a grand – but not too grand – villa perched among vineyards on a hill overlooking the town, and protected by a small squad of SS police troops, Schwend got down to building a fortune. With the forged notes he bought houses, hotels, ships, cars and shares in a number of companies. Some of it was used for bribes and he also sent plenty to vaults in Zurich. He developed a dense network of couriers and agents, including Jews. Jack Van Herten, for example, was a Dutch Jew operating under the cover of the International Committee of the Red Cross. In reality, he was smuggling Jews to the Middle East but at the same time passing on laundered money for Schwend. And Schwend also took over those warehouses at the Merano racecourse, hiding counterfeit notes in race boxes that were then distributed to Holland, France, Denmark and elsewhere. It was a huge operation and Schwend was making millions. But Kaltenbrunner was making even more. And right under the nose of the Höchster SS und Polizeiführer in Italy, Karl Wolff.

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Filed under Austria, Britain, economics, Germany, Italy, military, Switzerland, U.S., war

by | 22 December 2025 · 9:45 pm

Prominenten, VIP Nazi Hostages

From Victory ’45: The End of the War in Eight Surrenders, by James Holland and Al Murray (Grove Atlantic, 2025), Kindle pp. 67-68:

Kaltenbrunner, meanwhile, had also decided that hostages might offer a little bit of leverage in these days of the crumbling Third Reich. Throughout Germany were a number of high-profile prisoners, Prominenten, as they were termed. At the beginning of April Kaltenbrunner drew up a list of 139 men, women and children and ordered them all to be brought together. They were of seventeen different nationalities: there were Germans, French, British, Soviets, Czechs, Danish, Italians, Hungarians and even Greeks among them. They included the former French Prime Minister, Léon Blum, Admiral Miklós Horthy of Hungary, Colonel ‘Mad Jack’ Churchill, a British Commando officer, and even General Franz Halder, the former Chief of Staff of the German Army and the architect of the Blitzkrieg in the west back in 1940. General Georg Thomas, the former head of the Economic Department of the OKW, was also on the list, as were a number of those now categorized as Sippenhaft – family members of disgraced Germans, such as the wife and children of Claus von Stauffenberg, the man who had attempted to assassinate Hitler the previous July.

It was an astonishingly eclectic bunch of VIP prisoners, now brought together by Kaltenbrunner. They were to be sent first to Innsbruck and from there to South Tyrol, where they would be hidden away in a remote mountain resort and guarded by the SS. And from there they could be used as a bargaining chip under the threat of execution, which, if necessary, Kaltenbrunner fully intended to carry out.

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Filed under Britain, France, Germany, Hungary, military, USSR, war

by | 22 December 2025 · 8:56 pm

Path to Unconditional Surrender

From Victory ’45: The End of the War in Eight Surrenders, by James Holland and Al Murray (Grove Atlantic, 2025), Kindle pp. 9-12:

Roosevelt’s call for unconditional surrender accepted the challenge that Hitler now offered the world. It acknowledged that there could be no negotiating with the Nazis. Ten years of the Nazi regime had shown that with crystal clarity: the bad faith that Hitler had exhibited in the 1930s, blazing his way through the Versailles settlement while the West dithered about his intentions; his betrayal of his Soviet ally; the total disregard for human life, for institutions, the repression of so many, and the grotesque ideology that was the evil counterpoint to the ideals Roosevelt had proposed in the Atlantic Charter. Everything Hitler and the Nazis had done and stood for told Roosevelt there could be only one outcome in this war: the complete, total and unconditional surrender of Germany. The irony was that within Nazism, a core aim, a bitter principle, was to avoid any repetition of the end of the First World War. The myth of betrayal, the so-called ‘stab in the back’ of 1918, could never be allowed to gestate and fester in Germany again. Unconditional surrender would ensure that it did not, that this time the war would come to the centre of the Reich, to Berlin, to the Reichstag, to within mortar range of the Führerbunker; that however the Allies chose to fight following the Casablanca Conference, the end of this war would be nothing like 1918. The generals would not be allowed to blame politicians, capitalists and unseen dark forces such as religious minorities. Ulysses S. Grant’s defeat of the Confederacy forces at Donelson in 1862 would come to the Brandenburg Gates.

The announcement that the Allies would be pursuing unconditional surrender was made by President Roosevelt at Casablanca without prior consultation on the morning of 24 January. The President, sat beside the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, on the lawn of his villa, smiled benignly for the fifty pressmen assembled cross-legged like schoolchildren before them, waiting for their remarks at the conclusion of the ten-day conference. Roosevelt spoke first, reading from notes. ‘The elimination of German, Japanese and Italian war power’, he said in his precise, patrician and clipped East Coast accent, ‘means the unconditional surrender by Germany, Italy, and Japan.’ He paused for a brief moment then added a caveat. ‘That does not mean the destruction of the population of Germany, Italy or Japan,’ he continued, ‘but it does mean the destruction of the philosophies in those countries which are based on conquest and the subjugation of other people.’

Roosevelt later claimed that the phrase had just ‘popped into my mind’; Churchill was certainly wrong-footed by it, although he immediately supported the President. Yet while the announcement of this war-changing policy might have been unrehearsed, the two men had discussed it beforehand; Churchill had even written a long memo to the British War Cabinet four days earlier in which he specifically told them he and Roosevelt were anxious to announce their intention of pursuing unconditional surrender. FDR had also discussed the issue in Washington ahead of the conference. The President’s son, Elliott, even recalled Churchill making a toast to ‘unconditional surrender’ at a dinner ahead of the press conference that Sunday. Sitting there, in the sunshine of that warm January day in Morocco, Roosevelt may have told the press that his policy was the same as General Grant’s at Appomattox in 1865, but he was far from being the only person in the American establishment familiar with Civil War history, and besides he had misremembered Grant’s victory at Donelson.

All of this was neither here nor there, of course. The world now knew that the Allies would only end the war against the Axis Powers when they accepted unconditional surrender. Arguments raged at the time and have done so ever since about whether such a policy was too rigid and whether, ultimately, it extended the war longer than necessary. But by demanding unconditional surrender the Allies were offering moral clarity in clear political terms; it forged the Allies in agreement, and spared them the complications that trying to treat with Vichy France had thrown up. It was definitive yet at the same time vague: a plain demand that was short on detail but heavy with intent. Unlike the Fourteen Points President Woodrow Wilson had proposed back in 1919 – which had come to little – there were no matters of argument to engage with and twist, no promises made that could be misinterpreted or regurgitated at a later date. The Germans, the Japanese and the Italians must surrender, without any conditions whatsoever.

Then the Allies would dictate terms.

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by | 8 December 2025 · 8:34 pm

RLS’s Highlanders

From Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press, 2025), Kindle pp. 472-477:

However Louis’s best fiction may have originated, it sprang from long-meditated themes. His love of tales of piracy was waiting for Treasure Island; his dread of interior conflict was waiting for Jekyll and Hyde. The roots of Kidnapped reached back to his earliest days, when his family spent extended vacations at Bridge of Allan, a popular health resort northwest of Edinburgh. Nearby were Stirling Castle, which had endured eight sieges over the years, and the battlefield of Bannockburn, where a Scottish army defeated the English in the fourteenth century. Bridge of Allan was also close to the imaginary line that divided the Lowlands from the Highlands, as shown on the map (fig. 56). It wasn’t an actual physical boundary, or an administrative one either, but reflected an awareness that the cultures on either side were profoundly different from each other. In Kidnapped a character mentions “the Highland line.”

Louis was there at least ten times between the ages of three and twenty-five, and eagerly devoured tales of the romantic past. At Davos he planned to write a formal history of the Highlands, and although that never happened, the reading he did for it was still fresh in his mind when he began Kidnapped.

As their name implies, the Highlands of Scotland are very different, geographically and geologically, from the fertile Lowlands. They are dominated by mountain ranges, and Ben Nevis, at 4,400 feet, is the highest mountain in the British Isles. Population was sparse, supported mainly by cattle raising and subsistence farming. In a book about “Britishness” Linda Colley says that Lowland Scots “traditionally regarded their Highland countrymen as members of a different and inferior race, violent, treacherous, poverty-stricken and backward.” Conversely, Highlanders regarded the urban and commercial Lowlanders as a threat to their way of life.

As everyday garments men in the Highlands wore kilts, which were originally full-length cloaks but in the eighteenth century had been modified to knee-length skirts (women wore dresses, not kilts). The common language of the Highlands was Gaelic, completely different from the Lallans (“Lowland”) Scots that Louis enjoyed using; he never learned Gaelic. In the Lowlands most of the landlords, merchants, lawyers, clergy, and professors had welcomed the 1707 union of Scotland with England. They spoke English, and many of them pursued careers in London. That was the class to which both sides of Louis’s family belonged. He never felt that he belonged, however, and he identified in imagination with the culture of the Highlands, which appealed to him as romantic, passionate, and risk-taking—everything Edinburgh was not. “In spite of the difference of blood and language,” he once wrote, “the Lowlander feels himself the sentimental countryman of the Highlander.”

Clann is the Gaelic word for “family,” and clan membership was fundamental to Highland life. “The Highlands were tribal,” the historian T. C. Smout says, “in the exact sense that nineteenth-century Africa was tribal.” A clan might coincide geographically with a particular region, but some chieftains had no land at all; the basis of allegiance was blood relationship. Clan members owed military service to their chief if summoned, a feudal obligation that had not existed in England since the Middle Ages. The obligation of service operated in both directions. Smout explains, “Since all the clansmen from the chief downwards were blood relations of each other, it followed that the chiefs were expected to feel fatherly obligations even towards the poorest and weakest, and all the clansmen were expected to give unstinted help to each other in time of crisis.”

…

There were at least 120 clans in Scotland (including some in the Lowlands), depending how they’re counted—possibly more than 200. Among the most famous Highland clans were the Campbells and Stewarts in the south, the Mackenzies and Macdonalds further north, and in the western Hebrides the Macleans and Macleods. The map indicates the principal locations of a number of clans.

As Fernand Braudel showed in his classic study of the Mediterranean, mountain people everywhere have resisted control from outside, fragmenting into tribes or clans and engaging in endless feuds. Clan solidarity was intense in the Highlands; a character in Kidnapped comments that “they all hing together like bats in a steeple.”

Louis empathized with their defense of a traditional culture. Walter Scott’s novels celebrated the heroic past—that was why Louis’s father loved them—but he acknowledged the historical fatality of its passing, and understood that the defeat of the clans made the development of modern Scotland possible. Louis felt deeply disaffected from modern Scotland, and lost causes always fired his imagination.

Kidnapped is set in 1751, at a time in history that may need some context today. After King James of Scotland succeeded Queen Elizabeth in 1603 as James I, his line—the Stuarts—had occupied the British throne, ruling over England and Wales as well as Scotland. In 1714, however, the next Stuart in the succession was a Catholic. He would have become King James III, but Parliament had declared Catholicism to be disqualifying, and a Protestant imported from Germany was crowned instead as George I. From then on, many Scots claimed allegiance to the displaced Stuart heir, who was known as the Pretender. His supporters were called Jacobites, from Jacobus, the Latin form of James.

In 1715 James led an armed rebellion to recover the throne, but was defeated in battle in the north of England and spent the rest of his days in France. There was a second rebellion in 1745, led by his son Charles Edward Stuart—“Bonnie Prince Charlie”—and it too was put down. Many Scots continued privately to toast the Pretender as “the king over the water,” but England cracked down, constructing forts throughout Scotland to maintain control. English soldiers—the notorious redcoats—patrolled everywhere, and in effect the Highlands became occupied territory.

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by | 4 December 2025 · 1:32 pm

Taboos in Treasure Island

From Storyteller: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Leo Damrosch (Yale University Press, 2025), Kindle pp. 381-383:

It’s important to note that due to Victorian conventions, much of real life had to be left out of Treasure Island. A few years later Louis composed a sailors’ song purportedly heard in a London pub:

It’s there we trap the lasses
All waiting for the crew;
It’s there we buy the trader’s rum
What bores a seaman through.

The rum got into Treasure Island, the lasses didn’t. Although one wouldn’t expect female characters to play an important role in a quest for treasure, it’s still striking that Jim’s mother is the only woman in the entire book. In later novels, Catriona above all, Louis would try hard to give women a major role, but like other writers at the time he felt seriously inhibited by obligatory prudery. Publishers made their biggest profits by selling to lending libraries, which rejected outright any novel that hinted at sex. Louis told Colvin, “This is a poison bad world for the romancer, this Anglo-Saxon world; I usually get out of it by not having any women in at all.” Even when he did create female characters later on, he took great care to avoid sexually suggestive implications.

Victorian taboos were so strict that Louis’s pirates couldn’t even swear, though he himself, as Lloyd recalled, “could swear vociferously.” While he was writing Treasure Island he complained to Henley, “Buccaneers without oaths—bricks without straw.” He solved the problem by never actually quoting what they said: “With a dreadful oath he stumbled off.” No doubt he appreciated Dickens’s solution in Great Expectations, which was to write “bless” whenever Bill Barley, an old sea dog, would have said “damn”—“Here’s old Bill Barley, bless your eyes. Here’s old Bill Barley on the flat of his back, by the Lord. Lying on the flat of his back, like a drifting old dead flounder, here’s your old Bill Barley, bless your eyes. Ahoy! Bless you.”

The last of the seventeen installments of Treasure Island was published in Young Folks in January 1882, for a total payment of ₤30. For book publication Henley, as de facto agent, negotiated a contract with Cassell for ₤100; that may not sound like much, but it was a lot at the time, equivalent to ₤6,500 today. At that time Henley had an editorial position at Cassell’s, and had thrown the Young Folks installments on the chief editor’s desk with the exclamation, “There is a book for you!” Louis wrote to thank him: “Bravo, Bully Boy! Bravo! You are the Prince of Extortioners. Continue to extortion.” To his parents he described it as “a hundred pounds, all alive, oh! A hundred jingling, tingling, golden, minted quid.” Not only did he get ₤100 from Cassell, but they agreed to a royalty of ₤20 for every thousand copies after the first four thousand.

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by | 29 November 2025 · 9:42 am

Death Camp Workforce Induction, 1942

From The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World, by Jonathan Freedland (HarperCollins, 2022), Kindle pp. 71-72:

The next morning brought a 5 a.m. start for Appell at 6 a.m. As he had already learned at Majdanek, roll call was to count both the living and the dead, the latter category understood also to include the dying. If the figures all tallied, and no one was missing or presumed escaped, then the roll call would be declared over and the corpses could be taken away – each body carried by a single prisoner on his back, with the lifeless head lolling over one of his shoulders. As the pairs staggered off, they looked to Walter like double-headed monsters, prisoner and corpse joined together shuffling slowly towards the mortuary: it was hard to tell which one was dead and which alive, because they were both skin and bone.

It was strange for him and the other new arrivals, lined up in their civilian clothes, watching the inmates march off to hard labour while they were to stay behind. They were left to amble around the camp, around its open areas at any rate, trying to make sense of it. It was only on the following day that they were plunged into the ritual of induction, a re-run of the process Walter had undergone two weeks earlier in Majdanek.

It began with a forced trip to the showers. The Kapos beat them in there with clubs, herding 400 into a room built to contain thirty at most, then beat them back out again, kicking and clubbing them until they were standing naked in the cold. After that, still naked and shivering, came something new. They lined up to be tattooed with their Auschwitz number. Two fellow prisoners acted as clerks, taking down the inmates’ names and places of birth: Walter was entered into the ledger as having been born in Pressburg, the old Austro-Hungarian name for Bratislava. He gave his occupation as ‘locksmith’, adopting the trade of the man who was not quite his stepfather but regularly at his mother’s side. That done, it was time to be marked. Previously, the tattooing process had meant being leaned against a wall by a prisoner who then pressed a special stipple, resembling a stamp with metal numbers, into the left side of the chest, just under the collarbone. Often it was done with such brutality that many deportees fainted. But on this day, Walter was offered a choice. He could be branded on the left or right arm, on the outside or the underside. Walter nominated the top of his left forearm, where the mark would be immediately visible, and so it was done. For the next two and a half years, he would not use his name officially again. From that day on, he was 44070. Before long he would learn the importance of numbers in Auschwitz, how a low, ‘old number’ marked you out as a veteran, putting you closer to the top of the camp hierarchy whose strictures and privileges inmates strictly observed.

Eventually, they were given clothes. Their old ones were taken away, never to be returned and they were handed the familiar uniform made of coarse cloth, patterned with dull grey-blue and white stripes. So Walter would be a human zebra like all the others. Yet as he pulled on the tunic-cum-shirt – his number sewn on to it alongside the standard symbol for Jewish inmates, a star formed from two triangles, one the red of a political prisoner, the other yellow – as well as the trousers, baggy cap and wooden clogs, he took comfort, and not only from the fact that he was no longer exposed to the elements. He also liked that he was now indistinguishable, at a glance at least, from the rest of the pack, that he could, if he worked at it, melt unnoticed into the crowd. To disappear was, in its own way, a kind of escape.

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Filed under Germany, labor, migration, military, Poland, religion, Slovakia, war

by | 28 November 2025 · 6:25 am

Max Heiliger’s Recycled Wealth

From The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World, by Jonathan Freedland (HarperCollins, 2022), Kindle pp. 108-111:

WHAT WALTER SAW in Kanada was proof that Auschwitz had not lost its founding ambition, the one nurtured by Heinrich Himmler. Even if it were now tasked with the business of mass murder, its Nazi proprietors were clearly determined that Auschwitz should continue to serve as an economic hub, that even in its new mission it should turn a profit.

For Kanada was a commercial enterprise. Every item that was not broken was collected, sorted, stored and repackaged for domestic consumption back in the Fatherland. In one month alone, some 824 freight containers were transported by rail from Auschwitz back to the Old Reich, and those were just the ones carrying textiles and leather goods. Walter could see this traffic for himself, how a goods train would pull up every weekday to be loaded with stolen property. It could be high-quality men’s shirts on a Monday, fur coats on a Tuesday, children’s wear on a Wednesday. Nothing would be allowed to go to waste. Even the unusable clothes were sorted, then graded: grade one, grade two, grade three, with that last category, the worst, shipped off to paper factories, where the garments would be stripped back to their basic fibres and recycled. If there was even a drop of value, the Nazis would squeeze it out. Murder and robbery went hand in hand. Some of these goods would be distributed for free to Germans in need, perhaps via the Winterhilfeswerke, the winter relief fund. A mother in Düsseldorf whose husband was off fighting on the eastern front might have her spirits lifted by the arrival of a thick winter coat or new shoes for the children – so long as she did not look too closely at the marks indicating the place where the yellow star had been torn off or think too hard about the children who had worn those shoes before.

Besides the women’s clothing and underwear and children’s wear, racially pure Germans back home were eligible for featherbeds, quilts, woollen blankets, shawls, umbrellas, walking sticks, Thermos flasks, earmuffs, combs, leather belts, pipes and sunglasses, as well as mirrors, suitcases and prams from the abundant supply that had caught Walter’s eye. There were so many prams that just shifting one batch, running into the hundreds, to the freight yard – pushed in the regular Auschwitz fashion, namely in rows of five – took a full hour. Ethnic German settlers in the newly conquered lands might also get a helping hand, in the form of furniture and household items, perhaps pots, pans and utensils. Victims of Allied bombing raids, those who had lost their homes, were also deemed worthy of sharing in the Kanada bounty: they might receive tablecloths or kitchenware. Watches, clocks, pencils, electric razors, scissors, wallets and flashlights: they would be repaired if necessary and despatched to troops on the front line. The fighter pilots of the Luftwaffe were not to miss out: they were given fountain pens that had once inscribed the words and thoughts of Jews.

A few items would find a new owner on the spot. Those SS men who could get away with it, accompanied by their wives, would treat themselves to a trip to Kanada, dipping into the treasure trove for whatever took their fancy, whether it be a smart cigarette case for him or a stylish dress for her. The place was brimming with luxuries for every possible taste. Still, it was not these delights that gave Kanada its economic value or that took Auschwitz closer to its founding goal of becoming a moneymaking venture. A clue to the greater treasure was in that bench of women squeezing toothpaste tubes, looking for jewels or rolls of banknotes. Even beyond the high-end goods, Kanada was awash with precious stones, precious metals and old-fashioned cash.

Walter saw it with his own eyes, often barely concealed, stashed by victims in their luggage. It might be in dollars or English pounds, the hard currency that deportees had acquired after selling their property: their homes or their businesses, sold at giveaway prices in the hurried hours before their expulsion from the countries where their families had lived for generations. There was a team of clearance workers who specialised in finding money and jewels, but everyone in Kanada had the argot: ‘napoleons’ were the gold coins that carried the image of the French emperor, ‘swines’ the ones that bore, even a quarter-century after the Bolshevik revolution, the face of the Russian tsar. There seemed to be cash from every corner of the globe, not only francs and lire, but Cuban pesos, Swedish Croons, Egyptian pounds.

Walter had never seen wealth like it, a colossal fortune tossed note by note and coin by coin into a trunk set aside for the purpose. All the stolen valuables went into that trunk: the gold watches, the diamonds, the rings, as well as the money. By the end of a shift, the case would often be so full that the SS man would be unable to close it. Walter would watch as the Nazi in charge pressed down on the lid with his boot, forcing it to snap shut.

This was big business for the Reich. Every month or so, up to twenty suitcases, bulging with the wealth of the murdered, along with crates crammed with more valuables, would be loaded on to lorries and driven, under armed guard, to SS headquarters in Berlin. The destination was a dedicated account at the Reichsbank, held in the name of a fabulously wealthy – and wholly fictitious – individual: Max Heiliger.

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Filed under economics, Germany, industry, military, nationalism, Poland, religion, war

by | 26 November 2025 · 7:01 pm

Slovakia in 1939

From The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World, by Jonathan Freedland (HarperCollins, 2022), Kindle pp. 27-29:

Pupils at the gymnasium were given a choice of religious instruction: Catholic, Lutheran, Jewish or none. Walter chose none. On his identity papers, in the space set aside for nationality, he could have entered the word ‘Jewish’ but instead chose ‘Czechoslovak’. At school, he was now learning not only German but High German. (He had struck a deal with an émigré pupil: each boy would give the other advanced lessons in his native tongue.) In the class picture for 1936, his gaze is confident, even cocky. He is staring straight ahead, into the future.

But in the photograph for the academic year 1938–9 there was no sign of fourteen-year-old Walter Rosenberg. Everything had changed, including the shape of the country. After the Munich agreement of 1938, Adolf Hitler and his Hungarian allies had broken off chunks of Czechoslovakia, parceling them out between them and, by the spring of 1939, what was left was sliced up. Slovakia announced itself as an independent republic. In reality it was a creature of the Third Reich, conceived with the blessing and protection of Berlin, which saw in the ruling ultra-nationalist Hlinka, or Slovak People’s Party, a mirror of itself. A day later the Nazis annexed and invaded the remaining Czech lands, marching in to declare a Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, while Hungary seized one last chunk for itself. Once the carve-up was done, the people who lived in what used to be Czechoslovakia were all, to varying degrees, at the mercy of Adolf Hitler.

In Slovakia, the teenage Walter Rosenberg felt the difference immediately. He was told that, no matter the choice he had made for religious studies classes and the word he had put in the ‘nationality’ box on those forms, he met the legal definition of a Jew and was older than thirteen; therefore, his place at the Bratislava high school was no longer available. His education was terminated.

All across the country, Jews like Walter were coming to understand that although the new head of government was a Catholic priest – Father Jozef Tiso – the state religion of the infant republic was Nazism, albeit in a Slovak denomination. The antisemites’ enduring creed held that Jews were not merely unreliable, untrustworthy and irreversibly foreign, but also endowed with almost supernatural powers, allowing them to wield social and economic influence out of all proportion to their numbers. So naturally the authorities in Bratislava moved fast to blame the country’s tiny Jewish community – 89,000 in a population of two and a half million – for the fate that had befallen the nation, including the loss of cherished territory to Hungary. Propaganda posters appeared, pasted on brick walls; one showed a proud young Slovak, clad in the black uniform of the Hlinka Guard, kicking the backside of a hook-nosed, side-curled Jew – the Jew’s purse of coins falling to the ground. In his first radio address as leader of the newly independent republic, Tiso made only one firm policy commitment: ‘to solve the Jewish question’.

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Filed under Czechia, education, Germany, Hungary, language, military, nationalism, philosophy, religion, Slovakia