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Mata Hari – a brief summary

She enticed audiences with her dancing, her exoticism and eroticism – and her bejewelled bra, but in 1917, Mata Hari, a Malayan term meaning ‘eye of the day’, was shot by firing squad.

Margaretha Zelle

Born 7 August 1876 to a wealthy Dutch family, Margaretha Geertruida Zelle responded to a newspaper advertisement from a Rudolf MacLeod, a Dutch army officer of Scottish descent, seeking a wife. The pair married within three months of meeting each other and in 1895 moved to the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) where they had two children.

The marriage was doomed from the beginning – 22 years older, MacLeod was an abusive husband and Zelle was never going to play the part of the dutiful wife. Their son died aged 2 from syphilis, reputably inherited from his father (their daughter would die a similar death, aged 21) and in 1902, on their return to the Netherlands, they separated.

Unable to find work and uncertain about her future, Zelle moved to Paris and there changed her name to Mata Hari, claiming she originated from India and was the daughter of a temple dancer. She started to earn a living by modelling and dancing, and found work in a cabaret. Exotically dressed, she became a huge success and was feted by the powerful and rich of Paris, taking on a number of influential lovers. She travelled numerous times between France and the Netherlands. But by now war had broken out and Mata Hari’s movements and high-ranking liaisons caused suspicion.

Arrested

Arrested by the British, Hari was interrogated. She admitted to passing German information on to the French. In turn, the French discovered evidence, albeit of doubtful authenticity, that she was spying for the Germans under the codename ‘H21’. Hari had indeed been recruited by the Germans, given the name H21 and received 20,000 francs as a down payment. Never one to turn down money, she accepted it but did no spying in return nor ever felt obliged to.

Returning to Paris, Hari was then arrested by the French and accused of being a double agent. The evidence against her was virtually non-existent, and the prosecution found not a single item or piece of information passed from Mata Hari to the Germans. The trial itself was of dubious nature as her defence was prohibited from cross-examining witnesses. Her defence lawyer was a 74-year-old man, a former lover, and his association with Hari diminished his authority. The six-man jury had little hesitation in finding Mata Hari guilty.

And shot

At dawn on 15 October 1917, Mata Hari, wearing a three-cornered hat, was led out of her cell to face her death. She told an attendant nun, ‘Do not be afraid, sister, I know how to die.’ She refused to be tied to the stake or blindfolded, and waved at onlookers and blew kisses at the priest and her lawyer. She was shot by a 12-man firing squad, each wearing a red fez. The officer in charge ensured she was dead by firing a bullet into her head. She was 41.

Thirty years later, one of the prosecutors admitted that ‘there wasn’t enough evidence [against Mata Hari] to flog a cat.’

Rupert Colley.

Read more in The Clever Teens’ Guide to World War One, available as ebook and paperback (80 pages) on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

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August Kubizek, Hitler’s only friend – a summary

August Kubizek provides the only substantial witness account of Adolf Hitler’s early years in Linz and Vienna between 1907 and 1912. Born within nine months of each other, they met in their hometown of Linz where a shared love of art and music, especially the operas of Richard Wagner, brought them together. They became firm friends to the point Hitler became resentful if Kubizek paid too much attention to anyone else. While Hitler dreamt of being a great artist, Kubizek, or ‘Gustl’ to Hitler, dreamt of becoming a famous conductor.

In 1907, Hitler moved to Vienna while August Kubizek remained in Linz to work as an apprentice for his father’s upholstery business which was destined to become his trade. But Hitler somehow managed to persuade Kubizek’s father to allow Gustl to join him in Vienna and be allowed to pursue his musical ambitions.

Vienna

Thus the two friends were reunited and shared a room in Vienna. But while Kubizek was successful in his application to the Vienna Music Conservatory, Hitler failed twice to get a place at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. So ashamed of his failure that for a while Hitler kept it hidden from his friend.

In 1912, Kubizek went back to Linz for a brief visit. He returned to Vienna to find Hitler had moved out and had left no forwarding address. He was not to see Hitler again until 26 years later, in 1938.

Kubizek embarked on what promised to be a successful musical career but cut short by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Following the war, he became a council official.

The Reunion Continue reading →

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The Kitchen Debate – a summary

The Cold War and its ongoing ideological, political, and cultural battle was encapsulated by two men, both seemingly polite, arguing in a showroom kitchen in what has become known as the ‘Kitchen Debate’.

The two men were Nikita Khrushchev, Soviet Premier, and Richard Nixon, the US Vice President. The occasion, on 24 July 1959, was the American National Exhibition in Sokolniki Park in Moscow, part of a cultural exchange between the two superpowers. Although in Moscow, this was an American exhibition, and Nixon, for the benefit of Khrushchev, was its proud host.

Communism v. Capitalism

At times polite, at times restrained, mocking, jibing, or heated, the two men debated the relative merits of communism and capitalism, from nuclear weapons to washing machines, over several hours across many venues. At one point Nixon makes his point by jabbing his finger into Khrushchev’s chest whilst the Soviet leader listens, his bottom lip jutting out in anger.

But it was the image of Nixon and Khrushchev leaning on the railing in front of the model General Electric kitchen, surrounded by interpreters and reporters that captured the moment. The Cold War in a make-believe kitchen. Following in the footsteps, looking somewhat distracted, was the future Soviet premier and Khrushchev’s successor, Leonid Brezhnev.

The make-believe kitchen

The kitchen was part of a showroom house which, according to Nixon, almost any worker in America could afford. “We have such things,” said Khrushchev, adding that they had much the same for the Russian worker, but better built.

Nixon boasted of the processes and appliances available to the modern American housewife, “In America, we like to make life easier for women”. Khrushchev shot back, “Your capitalistic attitude toward women does not occur under communism”.

Khrushchev, exasperated and perhaps intimidated by the display of modernity, asked, “Don’t you have a machine that puts food into the mouth and pushes it down? Many things you’ve shown us are interesting but they are not needed in life. They have no useful purpose. They are merely gadgets.”

At one point, Nixon says to the Soviet leader, “You do all the talking and don’t let anyone else talk.” For the full text of this terse and entertaining exchange, see this pdf on the CIA’s website.

“We will wave to you.”

In one notable exchange Khrushchev asks Nixon how long America had been in existence, “Three hundred years?” he asks, making the mistake to emphasis a point. 150 years, Nixon corrects him.

Khrushchev’s answer captured the essence of the Soviet Union’s paranoia and jealousy of the USA: “One hundred and fifty years? Well then, we will say America has been in existence for 150 years and this is the level she has reached. We have existed not quite 42 years and in another seven years, we will be on the same level as America. When we catch you up, in passing you by, we will wave to you.”

Of course, it didn’t quite work out that way.

Rupert Colley.

Read more about the Cold War in The Clever Teens’ Guide to the Cold War (75 pages) available as paperback and ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

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A Stranger in My Own Country: The 1944 Prison Diary by Hans Fallada – review

During the 1930s and 1940s, Hans Fallada was one of the most famous writers in Germany. In 2009, over sixty years after his death, his reputation was resurrected in the English-speaking world with the first English translation of his bleak anti-Nazi masterpiece, Alone in Berlin. In 1944, following an altercation involving a pistol with his recently-divorced wife, he was sent to prison.

It wasn’t his first experience of German penal hospitality; twice before Fallada, born 21 July 1893, had been locked up on charges of embezzlement. Now, during his three-month spell in a psychiatric institution, he had chance to reflect on his life as a writer, husband and father living under Nazi tyranny, and felt impelled to write it all down. His request for pen and paper, in order, he said, to write a children’s book, was granted. Thus, with 92 sheets of paper at his disposal, he began to write.

It doesn’t hurt so much

Incarcerated in the ‘house of the dead’, as he called it, and sharing a cell with ‘a schizophrenic murderer and a castrated sex offender’, and checked on at regular intervals by the prison guards, Fallada wrote in minuscule letters, full of abbreviations and code words. His project was foolhardy, criticizing the very people holding him captive, and could have ended badly for himself and his friends and family. Nonetheless he pressed on, venting eleven years of ‘anger, bitterness and sometimes fear’ on the regime that had done so much to ruin the ‘unfortunate but blessed nation’ he loved so much. At the end of it, he writes of the cathartic release – ‘the old hatred of the Nazis is still there,’ he writes, ‘but it doesn’t hurt quite so much.’

Other German writers had fled abroad, but not Fallada despite being labelled for a while as an ‘undesirable writer’. Starting his memoir in January 1933, the month Hitler came to power, Fallada, a staunch anti-Nazi, wrote of living under the new, brutal regime. Laced with irony, Fallada begins by mocking the dim-witted Nazis, ‘psychopaths and sadists’, with their absurd obsession for uniforms, rituals and petty rules. But of course, living in Nazi Germany was no joke, and the mocking is soon replaced by expressions of incredulity and mounting anger.

Arrested previously in 1933 and temporarily detained in a filthy cell, Fallada experienced first-hand the Nazi ability to disregard an individual’s rights, and the presumption of guilt based on no more than the say-so of a Nazi informant. The law may have been on his side, but justice was easily trumped by loyalty to the regime.

All-pervading the poisonousness  
Continue reading →

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The 20 July Bomb Plot – an outline

The attempt on Hitler’s life on 20 July 1944 was the seventeenth known occasion that someone had tried to kill Hitler. The most infamous occasion being Georg Elser‘s solo attempt in 1939. Unlike other attempts however this, the 20 July Bomb Plot, was the most intricate, and involved plans for a new Germany following the successful accomplishment of the mission.

Count Stauffenberg loses faith

A fervent supporter of Hitler, 36-year-old Count Claus von Stauffenberg had fought bravely during the Second World War for the Fuhrer. Fighting in Tunisia in 1943, Stauffenberg was badly wounded, losing his left eye, his right hand and two fingers of his left. Once recovered, Stauffenberg was transferred to the Eastern Front where he witnessed the atrocities firsthand which made him question his loyalty. As it became increasingly apparent that Germany would not win the war, Stauffenberg lost faith in Hitler and the Nazi cause.

At some point in early 1944, Stauffenberg joined a group of German officers intent on bringing the war to a quick end and negotiating peace with the Allies. Their biggest obstacle was of course Hitler.

But the plotters received a bit of luck when Stauffenberg was appointed to the staff of the Reserve Army, reporting directly to General Friedrich Fromm, another officer who had lost faith in the Nazi cause. When Stauffenberg was invited to a meeting in Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair in Rastenburg, East Prussia, for 20 July, the opportunity seemed perfect.

The conspirators hatched their plan, codenamed Valkyrie, and crucial to its success was Stauffenberg’s proximity to Hitler.

‘I Am Alive, I Am Alive’ Continue reading →

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Hitler’s Mein Kampf – a summary

Originally published on 18 July 1925, Adolf Hitler’s semi-autobiographical rant, Mein Kampf, sold moderately at first. A second book, a follow-up written in 1928, was never published. However, by the end of 1933, Hitler’s first year in power, Mein Kampf, the ‘Bible of National Socialism’, had sold over a million copies. By 1939, at the outbreak of war, it was outselling all other titles in Germany with the exception of the Bible. Honeymooning couples were given a copy of Mein Kampf to savour, and no patriotic German home could be seen without a copy taking pride of place on the bookshelves. Although Hitler later claimed he regretted writing it, Mein Kampf made the German dictator a very rich man.

The earlier chapters concern Hitler’s upbringing, his formative years in Linz, Vienna, and Munich, his desire to be an artist, and his service during the First World War. Then begins the sledgehammer prose – some 600 pages of it. The book has not seen the light of day in Germany since the end of the Second World War but, contrary to popular belief, it is not banned there. Using the Swastika and the Nazi salute for non-educational purposes is forbidden in Germany but not the purchase or reading of the central ideological tenet of Hitler’s thinking. However, the state of Bavaria, which seized the copyright to Mein Kampf after the war, has steadfastly refused to re-publish the book fearing it could fuel racial tensions and be exploited by neo-Nazi groups.

‘My 4½ Year Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice’

Hitler was serving a jail term following his failed attempt to seize power in the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. He was tried for high treason and could have faced the death penalty but got away with a lenient sentence of five years. In the event, he served less than nine months, being released in December 1924. Although frequently depressed and talked of suicide, Hitler used his time in prison constructively, dictating to his deputy, Rudolph Hess, his autobiographical, ideological tirade. Published in two volumes, the first on 18 July 1925, and the second in 1926, Mein Kampf was originally entitled ‘My 4½ Year Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice‘; the new title being suggested by his publisher.

Much of Mein Kampf is devoted to race; the need for a pure race of German Aryans untainted by the blood of different ethnic groups. The Aryan race was of the highest order, the ‘bearers of culture’; the Jewish race of the lowest. ‘The whole existence (of the Jews) is based on one great single lie… that they are a religious community while actually they are a race – and what a race!’

Hitler’s stated aim was to eliminate the ‘hydra of World Jewry’ from society. Jews are referred to throughout the book by various unpleasant metaphors: parasites, germs, vermin. He expounded at length on the need for Lebensraum, the provision of extra living space for the growth of the German population at the expense of the Slavic races of Eastern Europe. Hitler took Darwin’s concept of the ‘survival of the fittest’, nature’s continual struggle for life or death, and applied it to race. For the Aryan race to survive, not only had it to prove itself as the strongest, but it was necessary to stamp out weaker, inferior races. And of course, no ‘race’ was as inferior or as weak as the Jew.

Rupert Colley.

Read more in The Clever Teens’ Guide to Nazi Germany, available as ebook and paperback (80 pages) on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

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Vidkun Quisling – a summary

On 24 October 1945, Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian Nazi, was executed as the ultimate traitor, and a new word entered common usage.

Born 18 July 1887, Vidkun Quisling’s life and early career had started promisingly. As a child, the son of a Lutheran pastor, he was considered somewhat a mathematical child prodigy and, as a young cadet coming out of military school, he gained the highest recorded marks in Norway.

Vidkun Quisling, CBE

After leaving the army, where he had worked his way up to the rank of Major, Quisling worked as a humanitarian, helping with the great famines in Russia during the 1920s. It was in Russia he became an avid anti-Communist and, in doing so, helped British interests in their diplomatic wrangling with the Soviets. In 1929 the British, so grateful to Quisling for his help, awarded him the CBE.

Between 1931 and 1933 Quisling was Norway’s Minister of Defence but then, disillusioned with democracy, resigned and formed his own ‘National Unity’ party, a Norwegian equivalent of the German Nazi Party. But the Norwegians had little time for fascism and in the 1933 national elections, Quisling’s party polled little more than 2% of the vote and gained no seats.

Quisling and Hitler

With no support and no influence, Quisling looked destined to wither away into obscurity. But in Adolf Hitler, whom Quisling visited in December 1939, he had a friend.

In April 1940, Quisling met German agents in Copenhagen and divulged secrets concerning Norway’s defences. Six days later – Germany invaded. On 9 April, Quisling stormed into the studios of Oslo’s radio station and declared himself prime minister. German representatives demanded that Norway’s king, Haakon VII, recognise Quisling. The king refused but, in danger, went into exile to England and there formed a government-in-exile.

With German backing, Quisling ordered all resistance to stop. Once Germany had established control of Norway the Nazis put Quisling in charge of their government of occupation. So trusting were the Germans of their Norwegian puppet that two years later, in 1942, they appointed Quisling Prime Minister and granted him full license to run the country without interference.

But on 9 May 1945, the day after Germany’s unconditional surrender, Quisling was arrested. King Haakon returned to his country, arriving amidst emotional scenes of jubilation.

Norway had abolished capital punishment in 1905, but its government-in-exile reinstated it specifically for Quisling and his highest-ranking colleagues. Hence, charged with high treason, Quisling was executed by firing squad on 24 October 1945. He was 58.

The Definition of Quisling

The word quisling entered common usage during the war as a term denoting a traitor. Today, in the Oxford English Dictionary, a quisling is defined as, ‘a person cooperating with an occupying enemy force; a collaborator; a traitor.’

In 1940, King George VI revoked Vidkun Quisling’s CBE.

Read more about the war in The Clever Teens Guide to World War Two available as an ebook and 80-page paperback from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

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Vera Inber – Leningrad Siege Diarist

Born 10 July 1890, Vera Inber was a Soviet poet and writer whose greatest legacy, Leningrad Diary, described the daily deprivations suffered by the city during the 900-day siege of 1941 – 1944.

Vera Inber’s father, the owner of a publishing house, was an older cousin to the future Bolshevik revolutionary, Leon Trotsky. As a nine-year-old, Trotsky lived in the Inber’s Odessa household at the time Vera was still a baby.

As a young woman, Inber worked as a journalist and lived in Paris and Switzerland before returning to the Soviet Union, first to Odessa and eventually settling in Moscow.

In 1941, with the outbreak of the Second World War in the Soviet Union, Inber joined the Communist Party. Together with her husband, she lived in Leningrad and recorded what she witnessed in a diary, published in 1946. In it, she wrote of the daily suffering of herself and the people she saw around her. She described the hunger, the cold, and the struggle to survive. Inber, herself, came close to dying from starvation.

Being a party member, Inber never criticised the regime or the city authorities and, as a result, the diary is sometimes regarded as overly propagandist. Nonetheless, it’s a fascinating account of the siege which includes a memorable account of sharing her apartment with a starving mouse, the rodent struggling to find even a crumb. She describes people pulling their deceased loved ones on sledges to the cemetery, of a dead horse stripped within moments of whatever flesh it had left, of the frozen bodies piled on top of each other and left to fester in apartment block cellars. Her greatest fear, she wrote, was ‘not the bombing, not the shells, not the hunger – but a spiritual exhaustion.’

During the siege, she composed an 800-line poem, The Meridian of Pulkovo, and often broadcast her poems on the radio. Her wartime work was much hailed and in 1946, Inber was awarded the Stalin Prize for literature.

In June 1944, five months after the siege was finally lifted, Inber and her husband moved back to Moscow. The final words of Leningrad Diary reads,

‘Farewell Leningrad! Nothing in the world will ever erase you from the memory of those who lived here through this time.’

Vera Inber died aged 82 in Moscow on 11 November 1972.

Rupert Colley.

Read more Soviet / Russian history in The Clever Teens’ Guide to the Russian Revolution (80 pages) available as paperback and ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Waterstone’s, Apple Books and other stores.

 

 

 

 

 

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The Vellore Mutiny – a brief outline

Fifty-one years before the outbreak of the year-long ‘Indian Mutiny’, took place another act of defiance against British rule in India. Lasting but a few hours, the Vellore Mutiny of 10 July 1806 was a mere foretaste of 1857. But the grievances that led to the brief uprising were very much the same as the ones half a century later.

Much of India, at the time, was governed by the East India Company. The monolithic, monopolizing commercial company with its own army had become the de facto rulers of the country on behalf of the British government. The town of Vellore, in southeast India, contained a large fort garrisoned by some 380 British soldiers and 1,500 sepoys. Incarcerated within the fort of Vellore, although in considerable comfort, were the sons, families and servants of Tipu Sultan, the former ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore, who had been killed by the British in battle in 1799. (Pictured the Vellore Fort today)

Religious sensibilities

In 1806, as in 1857, the Indian soldiers, sepoys, feared the British were attempting to undermine their religions in order to convert them to Christianity. A new dress code, introduced in 1805 by the commander-in-chief of the Madras Army, General Sir John Craddock, forbade Hindu soldiers from sporting any caste marks on their foreheads, banned the wearing of earrings and proposed that turbans be replaced by a round hat. Muslim soldiers were to shave off their beards and trim their moustaches. Craddock, in issuing his directive, was going against advice from his Military Board who warned that local religious sensibilities be respected.

United by their grievances, Hindu and Muslim sepoys decided to act. An initial protest resulted in a number of sepoys being lashed.

But in the early hours of 10 July 1806, the rebel sepoys launched their main attack on the fort. The rebels looted and killed, and barged into the garrison’s hospital where they slaughtered men in their hospital beds. 200 British soldiers were killed or wounded. The sepoys declared the eldest son of Tipu Sultan their new leader, hoisting Tipu’s flag atop the fort.

Rescue

The British took refuge on the fort’s ramparts. One soldier escaped, took to his horse and galloped the sixteen miles to the garrison based at Arcot to call for help. A small relieving force of about twenty men, led by Sir Rollo Gillespie, quickly made their appearance at Vellore. (Born in Comber in County Down, Northern Ireland, a statue of Gillespie standing upon a 55-foot high column today dominates the town square, pictured).

Climbing up the ramparts to aid the stricken British still clinging on, Gillespie led a bayonet charge to keep the sepoys at bay. More reinforcements arrived in larger numbers, blowing down the garrison gates and setting upon the rebellious sepoys. By 2 pm, the rebellion had been quashed. Retribution was swift and merciless; executions plentiful. The Vellore Mutiny was over.

Tipu Sultan’s sons and their retinues were resettled in Calcutta. The British certainly did not want to risk them becoming a rallying point again.

Rupert Colley.

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The Battle of Kursk – an outline

The Battle of Kursk, Germany’s last grand offensive on the Eastern Front and the largest ever tank battle the world’s ever seen, began on 5 July 1943.

The industrial city of Kursk, 320 miles south of Moscow, had been captured by the Germans in November 1941, during the early stages of the Nazi-Soviet war, and retaken by the Soviets in February 1943. Now held by the Soviets, Kursk and the surrounding area comprised a salient, or a ‘bulge’, 150 miles wide and 100 miles deep, into German-held territory.

‘My stomach turns over’

Soviet M3 Lee tanks, Kursk July 1943

German Field-Marshall Erich von Manstein wanted to recapture Kursk as early as March 1943 by ‘pinching the salient’ from the north and south, thereby cutting it off from the rest of the Soviet territory. ‘Operation Citadel’ would also provide, argued Manstein, an immediate morale booster following the German humiliation suffered at Stalingrad, but Hitler wanted to have a new generation of tanks ready before doing so. The normally bellicose Hitler was unusually nervous about the planned offensive, confessing to his general, Heinz Guderian, ‘Whenever I think of this attack, my stomach turns over’. Three times he delayed the date of the attack. The delays were to prove fatal.

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