Posted on 05/20/2022 4:05:50 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Charles Spicer. Pegasus, $29.95 (400p) ISBN 978-1-63936-226-4
Historian Spicer debuts with a detailed yet unpersuasive attempt to rehabilitate the reputation of the Anglo-German Fellowship, an “exclusive friendship society” comprising British aristocrats, politicians, businessmen, and military leaders who “wined, dined and charmed the leading National Socialists in Germany in the 1930s.” Classifying the group’s members as “amateur intelligence agents,” Spicer draws a somewhat murky distinction between their attempts to “civilize” the Nazi regime in order to avert war and Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement. Focusing on Fellowship members Philip Conwell-Evans, a Welsh political secretary and historian; Grahame Christie, a WWI pilot; and businessman Ernest Tennant, Spicer meticulously details his subjects’ many meetings with Nazi leaders including Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hermann Göring, and Rudolf Hess. While Spicer reveals that Fellowship members passed valuable information on the inner workings of the Nazi government to British and U.S. officials, coordinated with anti-Nazi resistance leaders in Germany, and earnestly believed that improved trade relations and cultural exchanges could decrease the likelihood of war, he overstates how much “the socially gauche National Socialists... admired and aped the British elites” and underplays the “naivety and gullibility” of the Fellowship. This revisionist history feels like a bit too much of a reach. (Sept.)
Then again there was “The Counterfeit Traitor” with William Holden.
I saw that movie a long time ago.
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Reading a great book now called ‘Beyond the Call’ about a US bomber pilot who was given a diplomatic passport to evac American POWs who had been liberated from camps and Poland and outright abandoned by the Soviets in Winter 1945.
No food no warm clothes and turned out into the Polish countryside to survive or end up in Soviet internment camps which were worse than the German POW camps.
Makes me despise Stalin more than I already did.
They sound naïve. However what was the harm in their attempt? If they had been successful and had WW II been avoided, the world would have been far better off. Also not sure their efforts did not have some effect. The war would have ended with a British defeat if Hitler had not stopped the German army from completing the defeat and capture of the British BEF at Dunkirk. Some historians speculated that Hitler, perhaps influenced by these “amateur spies” thought he could enter into a mutually beneficial peace with these types of British leaders if he showed mercy and allowed the British army to withdraw. Also Rudolph Hess made that famous solo flight to Scotland. Was it his intent or impression that he could make a peace deal after being influenced by those amateur spies? Believe there is more to the story.
These “amateur spies” may have confused the German leadership. Hitler lost his best chance for victory when he pulled the German army back at Dunkirk. Historians have arrived at no consensus as to his reasons. If they had been capyured or killed,Britain would have sued for peace.
The evacuated were pretty much limited to taking their rifles to Britain.
The Allied artillery and tanks had to be destroyed and left behind in France.
Hitler botched things up by grabbing all of Czechoslovakia.
Just downloaded it and listening to it now.
I don't think the War Cabinet would have sued for peace even if this army had been lost. After evacuation, they were pretty useless for months while they refitted. The Germans still had the problem of how to get their army across the Channel - one they never solved.
I’m not unsympathetic to some of the British Establishment’s attempts to steer the fascists toward a less brutal and less destructive path.
The shadow hanging over everyone in Europe was communism. Its easy to forget that now. Both the British and the Soviets were trying to harness the fascists against the other. Each had it in their minds that they would sit on the sidelines more or less while the fascists and the other party went at it. They - be they the Western Democracies or the Commies, would then swoop in and pick off the weakened victor of that clash.
Had Hitler stopped at the Sudetenland, he could have made the case that he was not an imperialist, that he did not wish to rule over any non Germans and that his ambitions were limited to that. He could even have rightfully argued that the Austrians and the Sudetenlanders wanted to be part of greater Germany. There’s no doubt unification would have won any free and fair plebiscite had one been held in those areas.
But....what is now the Czech Republic had been the center of heavy industry - particularly armaments in the Hapsburg Empire. Hitler especially wanted the massive Skoda works. Getting it undeniably strengthened Germany a good bit.
Awesome. It is based on the true events the author’s father experienced, who is the main character in the book.
You cannot appease evil.
Be ruthless is what needs to be done.
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