Category Archives: war

by | 27 December 2025 · 6:17 am

Humiliating Surrenders in 1942, 1945

From Victory ’45: The End of the War in Eight Surrenders, by James Holland and Al Murray (Grove Atlantic, 2025), Kindle pp. 295-296:

At 8.56 a.m. the eleven Japanese representatives were brought to the ship on a small launch, headed by the Japanese Foreign Minister, Mamoru Shigemitsu, dressed in formal morning coat, stiff collar and top hat. As they stepped aboard they passed through a corridor of ‘sideboys’, enlisted sailors standing to attention who had all been chosen because they were at least six foot tall. Everything about this ceremony was meant to demonstrate the vastly superior might of the Allies, and especially the United States. As if to further underline this physical discrepancy, Shigemitsu had a wooden leg – he’d lost the one he’d been born with when a Korean rebel threw a grenade at him in Shanghai. It meant he now limped across the deck to stand in front of the surrender table.

Then, at 9.02, MacArthur and Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz emerged. MacArthur stood at the microphone to the side of the table and began the proceedings, but before he sat down he said, ‘Will General Wainwright and General Percival step forward while I sign?’

Wainwright and the British General then emerged from the dignitaries lined up behind the table and stood either side of MacArthur as he sat down and signed the surrender documents. The Supreme Commander had also brought with him five fountain pens with which to sign the documents, and after writing his first signature turned to Wainwright. ‘He gave me the pen,’ noted Wainwright, who saluted awkwardly and took it, ‘a wholly unexpected and very great gift.’

MacArthur gave the second pen used to Percival, and the two generals returned to their places after the Allied signatures had been completed and it was the turn of the Japanese. First Shigemitsu hobbled forward and, bending over the table, signed. Then General Yoshijirō Umezu, the Chief of the Army General Staff. ‘We were, I felt,’ noted one of the Japanese delegates, the diplomat Toshikazu Kase, ‘being subject to the torture of the pillory. A million eyes seemed to beat on us with the million shafts of a rattling storm of arrows barbed with fire. I felt them sink into my body with a sharp physical pain.’

They were experiencing the humiliation of defeat. Of surrender. It was a terrible thing to endure, and yet General Wainwright, watching this, was unique among American senior commanders there that day in having signed an instrument of surrender of his forces – to the very regime that stood before him now. So too had General Percival, who stood alongside him; it had been Percival who had surrendered the British colonies of Malaya and Singapore – Britain’s largest ever defeat – in February 1942. And Wainwright had surrendered the whole of the Philippines three months later, in May; that also ranked as one of the worst military defeats in American history. The difference was that Percival had been the British C-in-C in Singapore from the outset, whereas Wainwright had not. Rather, the American was handed the poisoned chalice of command of the Philippines when MacArthur was ordered out by the President. And the defeat and surrender that had followed had been in part down to MacArthur himself and to the lack of preparation by the United States. It was certainly not Wainwright who was to blame, although in the long years since that day of infamy he had suffered plenty for it.

Leave a comment

Filed under Britain, Japan, military, nationalism, Philippines, Southeast Asia, U.S., war

by | 27 December 2025 · 12:46 am

Rare Japanese Battlefield Surrenders

From Victory ’45: The End of the War in Eight Surrenders, by James Holland and Al Murray (Grove Atlantic, 2025), Kindle pp. 266-268:

For Japanese commanders, surrender was in itself unacceptable and suicide preferable – death, however it came, either fighting on to the finish or taking one’s own life, was the way battle should end. In the combat on Iwo Jima from 19 February to 26 March, the Americans took a total of 216 prisoners from a Japanese Army and Navy force of 20,000, at which the Americans had had to throw 110,000 troops in total, costing them 6,821 dead as well as 19,217 wounded. On Okinawa civilians hurled themselves from the cliffs rather than be taken prisoner – this can be seen to be believed in American footage.

Only one Japanese unit broke the taboo and surrendered in the entire war: the 1st Battalion of the 329th Infantry on New Guinea, also known as the Takenaga Unit, who had been chased into the interior by the Australians. They numbered only fifty men. In April 1945 their officers decided that enough was enough – Japanese troops tended to travel light, hoping that their victories came quickly and they could scavenge supplies from their enemies or the local inhabitants wherever they were fighting. Prolonged campaigns being hunted down didn’t sit well with this tactical style. The Australians were astonished to discover one of their own leaflets, which suggested the Japanese surrender, with a scrawled offer to do just that, left on a pole in the jungle. Contact was made on 2 May, and Lieutenant-Colonel Masaharu Takenaga parlayed terms; the next day five officers, four warrant officers, thirty-three NCOs and other ranks went into the bag. It was a unique triumph for the Australian forces, and one they made much of – new propaganda leaflets dropped on the enemy spread the word, causing the commander of the Eighteenth Army, General Hatazō Adachi, to break down and cry at the dishonour they had shown the Emperor.

As Emperor, Hirohito was where the bushidō buck stopped. At least, within the kokutai, that was the rule the highest echelons of Japanese politics claimed to observe. Following Okinawa, though, the Emperor found himself strangely out of step with the recently created Supreme Council for the Direction of the War, the Gunji Sangiin. This core council, known as the Big Six, was running the war and advising the Emperor. The Big Six consisted of the Prime Minister, retired Admiral Kantarō Suzuki, seventy-seven – he had been Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet in the 1920s; Minister of Foreign Affairs Shigenori Tōgō, sixty-two, Minister of the Army General Korechika Anami, fifty-eight; Minister of the Navy Admiral Mitsumasa Yonai, sixty-five; Chief of the Army General Staff General Yoshijirō Umezu, sixty-three, and Chief of the Navy General Staff Admiral Soemu Toyoda, sixty. These men had been part of the Japanese higher echelons throughout the war and intransigence sat at the heart of their thinking – their resolve remained intact in spite of their attempts to marshal a Plan B with the Soviets.

Allied forces also captured roughly 10,000 Korean, Taiwanese, and Okinawan POWs, many of whom resented their Japanese officers.

Leave a comment

Filed under Australia, Britain, Japan, Korea, military, nationalism, Papua New Guinea, religion, Taiwan, U.S., war

by | 24 December 2025 · 3:59 pm

Preparing for VE Day in London

From Victory ’45: The End of the War in Eight Surrenders, by James Holland and Al Murray (Grove Atlantic, 2025), Kindle pp. 169-172:

ON 7 MAY IN LONDON THE BRITISH Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, was woken with the news of the surrenders earlier that morning in Reims: Jodl had signed on behalf of the Flensburg government at 2.41 a.m. Delivering the news was Captain Richard Pim, head of the map room. Churchill looked at the document and initialled it. This was the news he had been waiting so long for. He teased Pim that finally he had made up for years of bringing him bad news by delivering the best news of the war. Celebrations, though, would have to wait – a decision was made that 8 May would be ‘Victory in Europe Day’, rather than as the BBC had po-facedly decided ‘Ceasefire Day’. Even with unfinished business in the Far East, this was bigger than any ceasefire; Churchill would have his victory.

The news was impossible to contain – the Ministry of Information told the public at 7.40 p.m. that a formal announcement of the victory would be made the next day by the Prime Minister. That said, the shooting hadn’t yet stopped. The Kriegsmarine took it upon itself to sink two ships off the Firth of Forth, the Norwegian Sneland I and the Canadian Avondale Park. Nine merchant seamen were killed by U-2336, the last maritime deaths in the western theatre, drawing out the pointless killing to the very last.

Nevertheless, a national holiday was declared for 8 May. Knowing that the moment was approaching, the government made sure that the Ministry of Food had sufficient beer for the impending celebrations. Licensing hours were extended – though this conjures up the notion that they could somehow be enforced on such a day. The ministry had prepared for VE Day, instructing shops on how long they should open, reassuring people that milk would be delivered as usual and that bakers should bake enough bread for the following day. Government departments received the code words ‘Mousetrap: noon tomorrow’ to alert them to it being official.

…

Celebrations had begun on the evening of the 7th and went into the early morning of the 8th – at 2 a.m. ships in Southampton Docks sounded air horns and a searchlight flashed V for Victory.

…

The newspapers were also allowed, for the first time since war had been declared, to run a weather forecast. Weather forecasting had been a top-secret enterprise up to this point, something upon which the fate of nations, of invasions, of bombing raids and air defence hung. VE Day lifted such secrecy. The first forecast since September 1939 predicted rain for the afternoon. Fortunately it was wrong and a fine day followed, with sunshine – the ‘King’s weather’.

Leave a comment

Filed under Britain, Canada, economics, food, Germany, military, nationalism, publishing, Scandinavia, war

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.

Leave a comment

Filed under Britain, Canada, Czechia, France, Germany, military, Poland, U.S., war

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.

Leave a comment

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.

Leave a comment

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.

Leave a comment

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.

Leave a comment

Filed under Britain, Germany, military, U.S., USSR, war

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.

Leave a comment

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.

Leave a comment

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