Posted on 10/04/2010 11:26:57 AM PDT by nickcarraway
One of Hitler's most senior Nazis set his heart on a stylish retirement in Cornwall following Germany's invasion of Britain, new research reveals.
Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Fuhrer's foreign minister, planned to live in St Michael's Mount, one of the most beautiful locations in the country.
He had served as the Nazi ambassador to Britain in the late 30s and had his eye on the picturesque tidal island, which is 400 yards offshore, after spending a week in Cornwall in 1937. He also plotted to keep Tregenna Castle, near St Ives, as a holiday home once the Nazis had achieved world domination.
Von Ribbentrop's love affair with Cornwall tallies with stories that the Luftwaffe was ordered to avoid bombing particular sections of the Cornish coast.
He was one of Hitler's closest henchmen and was notorious for his arrogance when serving in London. He was eventually hanged as a war criminal following the Nuremburg Trials.
His designs on Cornwall emerged after local artist Andrew Lanyon spent three years researching the Nazi's links with the county.
Drawing on local testimony and contemporary reports, he said Von Ribbentrop had expressed a desire to move there after the war.
He said: 'In one visit, he was here for about five days in 1937. He brought his aides with him and went to St Ives.
'He said how much he enjoyed Cornwall. He said: "You are going to be invaded, you need an air raid shelter." 'He said Hitler had promised him the whole of Cornwall, and when he saw Tregenna Castle he wanted to live there. But when he saw St Michael's Mount he thought that was better - I suspect he wanted Tregenna Castle as his holiday home, he was that arrogant.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
They did plenty of oppressing from 1939-1941 as well.
People malign Chamberlain because he has come to be seen as the ‘face’ of appeasement, but whilst he was talking peace with Hitler, he was gearing Britain up for the war he secretly knew was coming, and he introduced peacetime conscription (unprecedented in all of British History and over strong objections), ramped up armaments production and prepared British industry to allow it to gear up to serve the war effort before 1939.
The PM who deserves blame for the appeasement policies was Stanley Baldwin. He comprehensively failed to prepare Britain to face Nazi Germany and left it to his successor, Neville Chamberlain to follow through. Chamberlain knew how woefully unprepared Britain was (he had warned Stanley Baldwin and urged him to increase armaments spending when he was Chancellor), when Chamberlain became PM in 1937, he was forced to play for time whilst he was working furiously behind the scenes to put Britain on a war footing...
I stand corrected. I take back my “Goering was an imbecile” remark.
You are right, it was Hitler himself who ordered the shift away from the RAF.
In fact, it’s probably true that every blunder the Germans made in WWII was directly ordered by Hitler.
He was good at bullying the weak-kneed West in the 30s, but once real war started, his bluster and arrogance led him to make one bad decision after another.
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