Statue of Karl Lueger in Karl Lueger Platz, Vienna

I was in Vienna a few days ago, filming for my next TV series, and witnessed Austrians wrestling with a dilemma about history that affects us all. The city authorities have just decided that a stretch of the historic inner road around the centre of Vienna which has for nearly 80 years been called the ‘Karl Lueger Ring’ will be renamed ‘University Ring’.

Why? Well, because Lueger was not only a brilliant city administrator – he was mayor of Vienna from 1897 until 1910 and introduced social benefits like an outstanding sewage system and fresh water – he was also an outspoken anti-Semite. So outspoken, indeed, that Adolf Hitler almost hero-worshiped him.

The stretch of road currently called the ‘Karl Lueger Ring’ runs past the University of Vienna, and many in the university have long been embarrassed by their address. So, now, it is to be changed. But there are many other places in Vienna that still bear Lueger’s name. Not least ‘Karl Lueger Platz’ in the city centre which also contains an epic statue of Lueger  (I was there 10 days ago and took the photo above of it). And there are no plans to remove this statue or rename this square.

This debate raises, of course, a huge question about how we see the past. To what extent can we judge the past by today’s standards? Lueger was a massive anti-Semite – absolutely – but so were millions at the time, and they wanted to commemorate not necessarily his antisemitism but his ‘good’ works for the city. If we condemn them and remove traces of this man, then what about all the statues in London to ‘heroes’ of the British Empire? Most of these 19th century worthies were racists – and a number, no doubt, anti-Semites. Equally, what about Stalin’s statue that still stands in Red Square by the Kremlin wall. Shouldn’t we be campaigning to make the Russians remove it?

I was just watching archive footage of the Nazi take over in Austria in 1938, and the swiftness with which Austrians renamed many of their squares ‘Adolf Hitler Platz’ is breathtaking. Just as swiftly, of course, they renamed their streets and squares something else when they lost the war.

To a degree, it’s about proportionality. Germans today do not want to celebrate Adolf Hitler. Nobody – well, only perhaps a small bunch of Neo-Nazis – wants to live on a road called Adolf Hitler Strasse. His reputation is pure black. But most others are shades of grey – like Lueger. About the shades of grey there will likely be debate and indecision – hence removing Luger’s name from one street, but keeping his statue in a square. (Mind you, I wouldn’t want to live somewhere called Karl Lueger Square – rather like the University authorities, I would be embarrassed to give out my address.)

But, what’s important, I think, is that you have to accept that people in the past were not like us – but there is a good chance we would have been like them had we been born into their world. It doesn’t mean we should necessarily celebrate today those who were celebrated then – thankfully most of us now condemn racism and antisemitism – but only that we need to be careful about imposing on people in history the values we now hold dear.

Hitler’s favourite city today

Congratulations to Mr Petrides of Kent who was the first person picked at random from those people who who got the answer right to the question in our spring competition: what was Hitler’s favourite city?

The answer was Munich in Bavaria. This ‘German’ city wrote Hitler in Mein Kampf, that he was ‘more attached to’ than ‘any other spot of earth in this world’.

Hitler, born an Austrian, always considered himself ‘German’ and it was only by finally being able to move to Munich in 1913 at the age of 24 that he achieved his goal of living in a truly ‘German’ city. In part, Hitler loved Munich because it was not Vienna, where he had been lodging for years – a city he considered seedy and impure.

Munich was to become known as the ‘capital’ of the ‘National Socialist Movement’ and in 1923 was the scene of the infamous Beer Hall Putsch – Hitler’s disastrous attempt at armed insurrection.

A signed, first edition of my book of essays, Their Darkest Hour’ will shortly be winging its way to Mr Petrides.

We are all incredibly pleased to announce that WW2History.com is now free to the world!

I thank all of the thousands of subscribers who have supported the site for the last two years and look forward to welcoming many more people to WW2History.com.

The ancient city of Dubrovnik in Croatia.

Croatia is an ideal tourist destination. The landscape is beautiful along the Adriatic, the people are friendly, there’s lots to see and do and the food is terrific.

But, I thought as I journeyed along the Croatian coast last week, how many people really know what happened here during WW2? When you mention ‘the war’ to anyone in Croatia they almost always think you’re referring to the civil war in Yugoslavia twenty years ago, during which the historic city of Dubrovnik was shelled by the Yugoslav army as the Croats fought for their independence. The dark and dreadful history of Croatia during WW2 is not something that is high on anyone’s agenda – it certainly isn’t a history that helps promote tourism.

From the spring of 1941 Croatia was an Independent puppet state within the Nazi Empire and the Croatian authorities – the Ustashi – under their leader Ante Pavelic – pursued a policy of racial and ethnic persecution every bit as bloody as the Nazis. The Ustashi established their own concentration camps, the biggest of which was the complex at Jasenovac along the bank of the Sava river. At Jasenovac the Croats murdered between 70,000 and a 100,000 people (as the war came to an end the Ustashi did all they could to destroy evidence of the exact numbers they killed).

The Jewish population of Croatia was all but eliminated, with the vast majority of the 40,000 or so Croat Jews killed by the Ustashi or the Nazis. Croat gypsies suffered as well, with around 30,000 murdered. And the Serbian population of Croatia was also targeted. Between 300,000 and 400,000 Serbs (some reports say many more) were murdered by the Croat Ustashi . Incredible statistics that are brought into even starker relief by the horrendous manner of many of the deaths. The Ustashi became infamous for the way they tortured and killed their victims – often in a manner too horrible to relate here.

As for their leader, Ante Pavelic – he was never brought to trial. He fled to South America and was eventually able to move to Spain, where he died in 1959 at the age of 70.

It’s a dark, dark history – every bit as dark in its way as the history of Nazi Germany – and it shouldn’t be forgotten by the happy tourists who flock to this lovely country.

It’s not hard to understand why the British feel so proud about their role in the Second World War. The undeniable truth is that this country, led by Winston Churchill, held out against the Germans in 1940 and thus prevented the Nazi domination of Western Europe.

And, of course, by thwarting the Germans the British never had to endure Nazi occupation and so didn’t have to discover just how many people in this land would have collaborated with the enemy. It’s this, I’ve always felt, that contributes to an underlying sense in the British national consciousness – most often unspoken – that ‘we were better than they were’ (and the ‘they’ usually – again normally unsaid – means the French).

But were we? Because something that happened seventy years ago this month ought to give us pause.

In April 1942 three Jews were deported from Guernsey in the Channel Islands. The Nazi occupiers had requested that the Channel Islands authorities co-operate in the persecution of the Jews and co-operate they most certainly did. The previous year, 1941, officials in the Channel Islands had called for all Jews to come forward and be registered – something that was the beginning of their suffering. Jewish businesses were compulsorily sold and at least one Jew on Jersey, Victor Emmanuel, ended up committing suicide.

The police on Guernsey – who wore the traditional uniform of the British ‘bobby’ – ordered three Jews, Auguste Spitz, Marianne Grunfeld and Therese Steiner to report for deportation from the island on 21 April. Therese Steiner, brought before Sergeant Ernest Plevin of the Guernsey police, burst into tears and told him that she would never see him again.

She was right. Once in France all three of the women from Guernsey were caught up in further Jewish deportations and transported to Auschwitz. None of them survived the war.

Whilst the authorities on the Channel Islands didn’t know for sure what would happen to the Jews that were deported, they certainly knew how much the Nazis hated the Jews and that those Jews sent from Guernsey were almost certain to experience further suffering away from the island.

Is what happened on the Channel Islands any indicator of what might have happened here on the British mainland if the Nazis had occupied this country? Well, I’ve been on holiday to both Jersey and Guernsey with my family and can certainly say these islands appear more British than anything else…

And remember the words of a British intelligence report from August 1945: ‘When the Germans proposed to put their anti-Jewish measures into force, no protest whatever was raised by any of the Guernsey officials and they hastened to give the Germans every assistance.’

Soon the lock is coming off…

From the start of May – the second anniversary of the launch of the site – WW2History.com will become a free resource that anyone can access.

This means that we will no longer be taking any subscriptions from today, before the site itself goes free on Tuesday 1 May.

This is a big step forward for the site and I decided to take it only after a lot of thought. I’ve been very pleased with the success of WW2History.com as a subscription site – with several thousand subscriptions taken out. On this basis the site would, within another year or so, have paid back the cost of making it and be delivering a future of profit.

So why should I turn my back on that financially attractive future? Well, because these are times of austerity in the educational world, and having discussed the situation with school and university teachers I came to the conclusion that the site could never reach many of those who wanted it most if we carried on as we are.

That’s why I came to the decision I did. I’ll always be incredibly grateful to everyone who has supported the site during this subscription period.

Auschwitz

Seventy years ago this week an event of enormous significance took place. The first Jews from outside Poland were deported to Auschwitz.

It’s significant not just because these Jews were from another European country – the first of many – but because of the deal under which they were sent. It was a shocking arrangement – one which reminds us that the Holocaust was far more than a solely ‘German’ crime.

These Jews came from the neighbouring country of Slovakia, and were only deported to Auschwitz after high level meetings between the Germans and the Slovaks the previous month. In February 1942 the Prime Minister of Slovakia, Vojtech Tuka had met with Major Dieter Wisliceny of the SS. After further reflection in Berlin, a deal was finally done whereby the Slovaks agreed to pay the Germans 500 Reichsmarks for every Jew deported. But on condition that the Germans guaranteed that these Jews would ‘never come back’. That way the Slovaks knew that they could steal the property of the Jews with impunity.

Silvia Vesela, then a young Jewish women, remembers how non-Jewish Slovaks turned on her. ‘I thought about it several times,’ she says. ‘Human material is very bendable. You can do anything with it. When money and life are involved, you seldom meet a person that is willing to sacrifice for you. It hurt, it really hurt when I, for example, saw my schoolmate shouting with her fist raised, ‘It serves you right!’ Since that time I do not expect anything of people.’

Silvia Vesela was transported with thousands of other Slovak Jews to Auschwitz 70 years ago.

Today, as well as their suffering, let’s also remember the negotiations which sent them there. And a deal which meant that a European state, Slovakia, ‘paid’ to have its Jews taken away.

I think a lot, as regular readers of this blog might know, about why we believe what we believe.

Why do we hold the opinions we do? Is it because of our education, the influence of our peers, our parents, our life experience – or some deep needs within us? I know this is also a subject that all of the great manipulators of human behaviour have also obsessed about – people like Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propagandist.

I made a particular study of the work of Goebbels, and still see the influence of his work all around me. I’m not saying that our politicians and their political consultants consciously ape Goebbels’ work – most probably know little about it – but the truths that Goebbels discovered are still clearly relevant.

In essence, Goebbels believed that the best way of influencing people was to entertain them – ‘above all don’t bore me’, was his instruction to those who worked for him. He also realized that it is much more effective to re-enforce people’s existing prejudices rather than to try and change their minds about anything. And when I see the work of political consultants, it’s obvious that many realize this central truth. They call it ’speaking to the needs’ of the electorate.

The trouble is that, as Goebbels knew, it can also be effective to appeal to the worst imaginable ‘needs’ of the electorate – the ‘need’ to feel that the problems we face are someone else’s fault, the ‘need’ to get rich at the expense of others, the ‘need’ to jump queues in order to get what we want, the ‘need’ to think that we are superior to others… and so on.

That’s why a leader like Martin Luther King is so extraordinary in history. When a reporter asked him why he was against the war in Vietnam when so many powerful people were in favour of it, King replied: ‘Sir, I’m sorry, you don’t know me. I’m not a consensus leader… I’ve not taken a sort of Gallup poll of the majority opinion. Ultimately a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus, but a moulder of consensus.’

How many leaders are like that? Not so many.

Congratulations to Mr Barnetson of Moray in Scotland who was the first subscriber to WW2History.com picked from all those who gave the correct answer to our Winter Competition.

The question we posed was: After one [bombing] raid on Germany  the 8th Army Air Force suffered such bad losses – more than 70 planes were destroyed – that their daylight raids were temporarily suspended. What is the name of the German city the Americans were trying to attack when they encountered such powerful resistance?

Mr Barnetson, along with  other subscribers, correctly identified this particular city as Schweinfurt. A signed, hardback, first edition of Max Hasting’s brilliant ‘All Hell Let Loose’ will shortly be winging its way to him.

Our new competition has another hardback, signed first edition on offer – ‘Their Darkest Hour’ – my own book about the most extraordinary people from WW2 that I have met over the last twenty years.

Filming in Red Square, Moscow, 1989.

An old colleague of mine was clearing out some junk and found this photo. It’s me in Red Square not long before Communism fell and the Soviet Union was disbanded.

I loathed the Soviet Union.  From the trivial reasons – the food was appalling and so was the service in hotels and just about everywhere else – to the important ones – this was a state that imprisoned people just for speaking their minds and preached ‘equality’ whilst the bosses lived in luxury. I’ve never seen a more ‘unequal’ society in my life.

But this photo is interesting to me not just because of the wild glasses I’m wearing – very fashionable at the time – nor because it shows me standing next to a film camera and we’ve only shot on video for the last twenty years, but because if captures a particular moment that I remember well.

There was no sense I felt at the time I was there – at the moment this photo was taken – that the whole structure of Soviet life would shortly collapse. Everything there still seemed so certain. And in that respect it represents my own experience of something that countless eye witnesses from WW2 have told me. That life can change in a moment. Life is fleeting and uncertain and yet we try and pretend that it is lengthy and fixed.

It’s like a famous Sufism. A king asks his wise men to boil down all of the wisdom in the world into two words. They work for years and years and eventually come up with what they think is the one eternal truth by which we all have to live. And the two words that express it are: Things change.