The Point of No Return

in ,

Barely two months before the opening of the Nuremberg trials, British prime minister Clement Attlee wrote to President Truman about the “displaced persons”—the DPs—of numerous nationalities stranded in the fallen Reich. Attlee explained that British forces would continue to “avoid treating [the Jewish DPs] on a racial basis. . . . One must remember that within these camps were people from almost every race in Europe and there appears to have been very little difference in the amount of torture and treatment they had to undergo.”

As David Nasaw devastatingly illustrates in “The Last Million,” there was widespread reluctance among the victorious Allies to confront the true nature of the Holocaust, so it’s just possible that Attlee (no anti-Semite but no Zionist either) believed what he wrote. Whatever his motive, he undoubtedly didn’t want to see “the Jews [placed] in a special racial category at the head of the queue.” Much of the reason was Palestine, then under British control: “We have the Arabs to consider as well.” Attlee’s worry, evident in the letter if never explicitly spelled out, was that defining the Jewish DPs as a distinct group, unable to return “home,” would bolster the argument that they be permitted to immigrate to Palestine, in which, and about which, tensions were running dangerously high. Attlee warned that “the whole Middle East” could be “set aflame.”

Read More

Three on the Third Reich: High-Speed History

in ,

On Dec. 14, 1932,Germany’s head of state, President Paul von Hindenburg, a former general, a Prussian’s Prussian, hosted a party in honor of Ernst Lubitsch, a German Jew who had emerged as one of Hollywood’s finest directors. As two German writers, Rüdiger Barth and Hauke Friederichs, relate in “The Last Winter of the Weimar Republic,” another guest asked Lubitsch why he no longer worked in Germany. “That’s finished,” he replied, “nothing good is going to happen here for a long time.” Less than two months later, von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler Germany’s chancellor.

Read More

Crawling Between the Giants’ Toes

in ,

Speaking in the U.K. in late 2019, Guy Verhofstadt, former Belgian prime minister and one of the most prominent members of the European Union’s parliament, had this to say to his audience: “The world of tomorrow is not a world order based on nation states or countries. It is a world order that is based on empires. China is not a nation, it’s a civilization. India is not a nation. The U.S. is also an empire, more than a nation. . . . The world of tomorrow is a world of empires in which we Europeans, and you British, can only defend your interests, your way of life, by doing it together, in a European framework and in the European Union.”

In “Too Small to Fail,” Swiss writer and investor R. James Breiding takes a different tack, arguing that if “size has become unmoored from power,” if “greater social cohesion results in more easily governable and economic[ally] efficient societies,” if “technology is causing the speed of change to accelerate at an unprecedented rate, then the future will favour smaller, nimbler and more cohesive societies.” The corollary of that logic is that the behemoths should shrink. “Why shouldn’t Californians seek independence?” he writes at one point. And Mr. Breiding is not entirely optimistic about the future of the EU.

Read More

‘Pravda Ha Ha’ Review: Requiem for a Dream

in ,

There are, remarkably, people who still believe that history has a “right side”—and Britain-based travel writer Rory MacLean, with his “firm and unwavering belief in the promise of the future,” is one of them. Intriguing, informative and infuriating, Mr. MacLean’s latest work, “Pravda Ha Ha: True Travels to the End of Europe,” is something of a return, literally and figuratively, to the ground covered in his beautifully written first book, “Stalin’s Nose” (1992), an account of a trip around Eastern Europe during that exhilarating interlude between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Read More

Feeding The Enemy

in ,

The American troops who landed in Russia to help reverse the Bolshevik coup of 1917 did little to change history, but cast as imperialist villains, they were useful to Soviet propagandists charged with rewriting it. In “The Russian Job: The Forgotten Story of How America Saved the Soviet Union From Ruin,” Douglas Smith tells the remarkable tale of a different, largely forgotten yet infinitely more effective intervention.

Read More

Confessions of a Revolutionary

in ,

Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon” was one of the most influential novels of the 20th century, and the 20th century would have been a better century had it been more influential still. Yet until now, the book could only be read at one remove, in editions based on a hasty English translation of a German text presumed lost in the confusion of wartime.

Read More

Such, Such Were the Joys

in ,

Britain’s “public,” which is to say private, schools have been around since at least the 14th century. The controversy over their place in the country’s life sometimes seems to have been raging for almost as long, although it really only took off a couple hundred years ago, the day before yesterday in a land of ancient grievances.

“Gilded Youth,” James Brooke-Smith ’s addition to the sizeable canon of unflattering accounts of these curious establishments, has plenty of room for familiar complaints: bullying, sadism, sexual abuse, emotional repression, entrenching “the privilege of the wealthy few,” and so on. But even those exhausted with this well-worn topic may be intrigued by Mr. Brooke-Smith’s examination of the surprisingly complex history of public school dissent—there were some inmates who struck back against what they saw as asylums.

Read More