Free Republic

On this date in 1923, a German paramilitary was shot by a French firing squad near Dusseldorf for his anti-occupation sabotage efforts. Albert Leo Schlageter, a World War I veteran and conservative Catholic who signed up with the right-wing Freikorps and tangled with communists after the war, joined the fledging Nazi party when it absorbed his Freikorps unit in 1922. The next year, France occupied the Ruhr to secure war reparations payments then crippling Germany, which would do much to speed the rise of the Nazis in the years ahead. Schlageter was nabbed sabotaging railroad lines in resistance, and Berlin’s...

German soldiers cross into Belgium in August 1914 Photo: RA/Lebrecht Music & Arts Like one of Field Marshal Haig’s family whiskies, Max Hastings is a dram that steadily improves with age. His own trenchant views on war, and caustic opinions of the commanders who ran them, tended to obtrude too obviously in his early works, suggesting that if only he had been present at key military conferences costly errors would have been avoided. However, Hastings’s recent massive volumes on his specialist subject, the Second World War, have shown why his position as Britain’s leading military historian is now unassailable. They...