The words were Winston Churchill’s and the great general he was referring to was Erwin Rommel.

The Desert Fox

Born 15 November 1891, Erwin Rommel was, as Churchill suggests, respected as a master tactician, the supreme strategist who, in 1940, helped defeat France and the Low Countries and then found lasting fame when sent by Hitler to North Africa where, commanding the Afrika Korps, he earned the sobriquet, the Desert Fox. Germany, his nation, adored him, his troops loved him, Hitler treasured him and his enemies respected him. His Afrika Korps was never charged with any war crimes and prisoners of war were treated humanely. When his only son, Manfred, proposed joining the Waffen SS, Rommel forbade it.

In June 1944 Rommel was sent to Northern France to help coordinate the defence against the Allied Normandy Invasion but was wounded a month later when an RAF plane strafed his car. Rommel returned home to Germany to convalesce.

The July Bomb Plot

Meanwhile, on 20 July 1944, Hitler survived an assassination attempt in his Wolf’s Lair in East Prussia, the ‘July Bomb Plot’, perpetuated by Nazi officers who hoped to shorten the war with his removal. Hitler, although shaken, suffered only superficial injuries, and those responsible were soon rounded up and executed. Rommel, although not involved and actively against any plan to assassinate Hitler, did support the idea of having him removed from power. Once his association with the plotters, however tenuous, came to light, his downfall was inevitable and swift.

On 14 October 1944, Hitler dispatched two generals to Rommel’s home in Herrlingen to offer the fallen Field Marshal a bleak choice. Manfred, aged 15, was at home with his mother when the call came. He waited nervously as the three men talked in private, and then as his father went upstairs to speak to his mother. Finally, Rommel spoke to his son and told him of Hitler’s deal.

Manfred’s story

Writing after the war, Manfred described the scene as his father said, ‘”I have just had to tell your mother that I shall be dead in a quarter of an hour… The house is surrounded and Hitler is charging me with high treason. In view of my services in Africa, I am to have the chance of dying by poison. The two generals have brought it with them. It’s fatal in three seconds. If I accept, none of the usual steps will be taken against my family, that is against you.”

‘”Do you believe it?”‘ asked Manfred.

‘”Yes, I believe it. It is very much in their interest to see that the affair does not come out into the open. By the way, I have been charged to put you under a promise of the strictest silence. If a single word of this comes out, they will no longer feel themselves bound by the agreement.”‘

Manfred continues, ‘The car stood ready. The SS driver swung the door open and stood to attention. My father pushed his Marshal’s baton under his left arm, and with his face calm, gave Aldinger (Rommel’s aide) and me his hand once more before getting in the car… My father did not turn again as the car drove quickly off up the hill and disappeared around a bend in the road. When it had gone Aldinger and I turned and walked silently back into the house.

‘Twenty minutes later the telephone rang. Aldinger lifted the receiver and my father’s death was duly reported.’

A loyal German soldier

Having died from ‘the injuries sustained during the RAF attack in France’, Erwin Rommel was, as promised, buried with full military honours, accorded an official day of mourning, and his family pensioned off.

Writing after the war, Churchill wrote that Rommel was deserving of ‘our respect, because, although a loyal German soldier, he came to hate Hitler and all his works, and took part in the conspiracy to rescue Germany by displacing the maniac and tyrant. For this, he paid the forfeit of his life.’

Pictured is Rommel’s memorial at the place of his suicide at Herrlingen in southern Germany, but, since 1968, known as Blaustein. Manfred died in November 2013, aged 84.

Rupert Colley.

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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Joseph Stalin married twice. His first wife, Ekaterina Svanidze, died in December 1907, aged 22, from typhus. His second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, shot herself and died on 9 November 1932, aged 31.

As a two-year-old in 1903, Nadezhda, or Nadya, Alliluyeva was reputedly saved from drowning by the visiting 25-year-old Stalin. When staying in St Petersburg (later Petrograd), Stalin often lodged with the Alliluyev family. We don’t know for sure but he may have had an affair with Olga Alliluyeva, Nadya’s mother and his future mother-in-law.

In March 1917, Stalin returned to Petrograd from exile to join the unrest following the February Revolution and the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II. By then Nadya was 16 and she fell for the romantic revolutionary with his sweep of jet-black hair.

Mr and Mrs Stalin

Following the October Revolution of 1917, Nadya became Stalin’s personal assistant as he embarked on his job as the People’s Commissar for Nationalities and joined him in the city of Tsaritsyn during the Russian Civil War. They married in 1919 and had two children: Vasily, born 1921, and Svetlana, born 1926. (In 1967, Svetlana was to defect to the US, became known as Lana Peters and died in Wisconsin on 22 November 2011).

Following the civil war, they returned to the capital. Nadya found life in the Kremlin suffocating. Her husband, whom she once saw as the archetypal Soviet ‘new man’, turned out to be a quarrelsome bore, often drunk and flirtatious with his colleague’s wives. A manic-depressive and prone to violent mood swings, Stalin’s colleagues thought her ‘mad’.

Chemistry student

In 1929, bored of being cooped up in the Kremlin, Nadya enrolled on a course in chemistry. She diligently went to university each morning by public transport, shunning the official limousine. Her new-found student friends, not realising who she was, told her horrific stories concerning Stalin’s collectivization policy. When she confronted her husband, accusing him of ‘butchering the people’, he reacted angrily and had her friends arrested.

Days before her death, according to her daughter, Nadya confided to a friend that ‘nothing made her happy’, least of all her children.

The Banquet

On the evening of 8 November 1932, Stalin and Nadya hosted a banquet to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of the October Revolution. They often argued and this party was no different, with Nadya accusing Stalin of being inconsiderate towards her. His response was to humiliate her in front of their guests by flicking cigarettes at her and addressing her ‘hey, you!’  Nadya stormed out. Molotov’s wife chased after her and together they walked around the Kremlin grounds until Nadya calmed down and retired to bed.

The following morning, servants found Nadya dead – she had shot herself with a pistol given to her by her brother, Pavel Alliluyev, as a present from Berlin. (Pavel, who was there that morning and comforted his grieving brother-in-law, would die in suspicious circumstances six years later, aged 44. Indeed, most of the Alliluyev clan would suffer early deaths on the orders of Stalin. His daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, wondered whether Stalin would eventually have had her own mother arrested).

Straightaway, the rumour was that Stalin himself had killed her. But those who saw him in the immediate aftermath witnessed his heartbreak and the incomprehension that his wife should have punished him so by taking her own life.

Reproach and accusations

Nadya had left a note for Stalin which, according to Svetlana, was both personal and ‘partly political’. Although she never saw it, Svetlana described it as being ‘full of reproach and accusations’. Stalin certainly took Nadya’s death badly, believing that she had taken her own life to punish him. His anger and grief seemed genuine and he was unable to bring himself to attend her funeral or, later, visit her grave.

The public was told that Nadya Alliluyeva had died from appendicitis – as was her daughter, then aged six. It wouldn’t have been good for Stalin’s image to have a wife who had committed suicide. Svetlana found out the truth quite by accident a decade later.

On the day of her State funeral, Stalin muttered, ‘She went away as an enemy’.

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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Geli Raubal was the daughter of Hitler’s half-sister, Angela. Angela and Adolf grew up together; both products of the same father, Alois Hitler, and his second and third wives respectively.

Uncle Alf

In 1928, Hitler offered his sister the position of housekeeper in his Bavarian mountain retreat. Angela arrived with her two daughters, Elfriede and nineteen-year-old Angela, known as Geli. Hitler immediately took a shine to the carefree Geli and, in order to remove her from her mother’s watchful eye, installed her in his Munich apartment. Nineteen years Hitler’s junior, she was, according to one of Hitler’s aides, ‘of medium size, well developed, had dark, rather wavy hair, and lively brown eyes… it was simply astonishing to see a young girl at Hitler’s side.’

Geli, who called Hitler ‘Uncle Alf’, had been born in Linz; the town Hitler always considered his hometown, on 4 June 1908.

Hitler liked to be seen with his attractive niece, taking her to meetings, and to restaurants and theatres, but their relationship was a stormy one. Both were consumed by jealousy – Geli of Hitler’s relationship with a seventeen-year-old Eva Braun, a model for Hitler’s photographer, Heinrich Hoffman; and Hitler by Geli’s flirtatious conduct and numerous admirers. Indeed, Hitler once told Hoffman, ‘I love Geli and could marry her.’

Instead, Hitler controlled her life and dictated whom she was allowed to see and when. Geli found her uncle’s overbearing influence suffocating. He refused Geli permission to move to Vienna to study music (Vienna was where, as a young man, Hitler twice unsuccessfully applied to the art academy).

When Hitler suspected Geli of dating his chauffeur, an ex-convict called Emil Maurice, he flew into a rage and had the man sacked (although he was at some point later re-instated). What we don’t know for sure was whether Hitler had a sexual relationship with his niece. His sexuality has always been a subject of debate – was he homosexual or even asexual? Hitler often maintained he was wedded to the German nation and had no time for women. (He only married Eva Braun in the bunker beneath the Reichstag in Berlin just forty hours before their joint suicide in 1945.)

Sickened

With regards to Geli, Wilhelm Stocker, an SA officer, decades later, wrote, ‘She admitted to me that at times Hitler made her do things in the privacy of her room that sickened her but when I asked her why she didn’t refuse to do them she just shrugged and said that she didn’t want to lose him to some woman that would do what he wanted.’ The ‘things’ that ‘sickened’ her, so speculation has it, included sexual games involving urination.

In 1929, Hitler wrote Geli an explicit letter. The letter, had it been exposed to the press, would have spelled the end of Hitler’s career. It fell to a Catholic priest, Father Bernhard Stempfle, a fervent anti-Semite who had helped Hitler edit his biographical Mein Kampf, to rescue the letter. (Fr Stempfle would later fall victim to Hitler’s purge, the Night of the Long Knives, probably for simply knowing too much about Hitler’s deepest secrets. His body was found in a forest near Munich with a broken neck and three bullets in the heart).

For the last time – no

On the afternoon of 18 September 1931, witnesses heard Hitler and Geli have a row. As he got into his car to go to a meeting ahead of attending a conference in Hamburg, Hitler was heard shouting, ‘For the last time – no.’ After Uncle Alf’s angry departure, staff at the apartment heard Geli stomping around and may have heard a noise that sounded like a shot from a revolver.

The following morning, when Geli failed to emerge for breakfast, they knocked on her door, but found it locked from the inside. When there was no answer, they either broke the door down or called in a locksmith (accounts vary). The exact sequence of events is unclear. Inside they found Geli lying face down in a pool of blood with a single bullet wound to her heart. The gun, lying nearby, had been Hitler’s revolver. It looked like suicide. Yet, on the writing desk, was an upbeat letter Geli was in the process of writing to a friend. It was left unfinished in midsentence.

The seeds of inhumanity

There was no inquest into her death nor an autopsy. The passage of the bullet was not consistent with suicide, yet suicide was the verdict. There were several rumours – that her nose was broken, that she was pregnant.

The first police officer on the scene, Heinrich Muller (pictured), was seen pocketing the letter and the pistol into his coat. He was later appointed head of the Gestapo. An anti-Nazi journalist, Fritz Gerlich, claimed that Hitler never did leave for his meeting, and that he and Geli had lunch together at a local restaurant. On returning to their apartment, they had a row that resulted in Geli’s death. (Gerlich once defined the Nazi Party as: ‘Enmity with neighbouring nations, tyranny internally, civil war, world war, lies, hatred, fratricide and boundless want.’. Gerlich and, apparently, the owner of the restaurant, was another killed during the Night of the Long Knives.)

When Hitler was told of his niece’s death, by Rudolf Hess, he fell into a deep depression, almost comatose, and talked of taking his own life. Colleagues kept watch over him. He became a vegetarian because, apparently, the sight of meat reminded him of her corpse. Her bedroom was sealed off and maintained as a shrine. Each year, on the anniversaries of her birth and her death, the room was decked with flowers.

How Geli’s mother, Angela, reacted to the news is not recorded but one can imagine. She stayed on working for Hitler until, in 1936, she left his employ to marry an architect. Hitler, upset by her departure, did not send a wedding present.

Heinrich Hoffman, Hitler’s official photographer, later stated that Raubal’s death ‘was when the seeds of inhumanity began to grow inside Hitler’.

Sixteen months after the death of Geli Raubal, on 30 January 1933, Hitler was appointed chancellor.

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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Chicken farmer

Heinrich Himmler was born the son of a Catholic schoolteacher in Munich on 7 October 1900. After a stint in the army during the First World War, although he missed out on seeing active service, Himmler studied agriculture and held a number of jobs including that of a chicken farmer and a fertilizer salesman before joining the Nazi Party in 1921.

Hardworking and meticulous, Himmler became devoted to Hitler and the Nazi cause. He took part in the failed putsch of 1923 in which Hitler tried to seize power in Bavaria. Between 1926 and 1930, Himmler acted as the Nazi party’s propaganda leader until, in 1929, Hitler appointed him head of the SS.

In 1934, Himmler became head of the Prussian division of the Gestapo and, two years later, head of all Nazi security organs. In 1933, soon after Hitler’s coming to power, Himmler established the first concentration camp at Dachau, near Munich, and in 1934, played a vital role in the elimination of Hitler’s opponents during the ‘Night of the Long Knives‘.

A page of glory

During the war, Himmler was responsible for co-ordinating the systematic murder of Jews and other victims of the Nazi regime, extending and expanding the network of concentration and death camps, and responsible for implementing the ‘Final Solution’.

Himmler suffered from various psychosomatic illnesses and intense headaches and was shocked and sickened by what he saw when visiting the camps he administered. Yet he remained determined that the work should continue, however distasteful.

On 4 October 1943, addressing an audience of SS officers in Posen, he said, ‘Whether or not 10,000 Russian women collapse from exhaustion while digging a tank ditch interests me only in so far as the tank ditch is completed for Germany … This is a page of glory in our history, which has never been written and is never to be written…. We had the moral right, we had the duty to our people, to destroy this people which wanted to destroy us.’

On another occasion, he compared Anti-Semitism to delousing: ‘Getting rid of lice is not a question of ideology, it is a matter of cleanliness.’

In 1943, Himmler was appointed minister of the interior, and expanded the Waffen-SS, the Armed SS, to the point its strength rivaled the regular German army.

Himmler had his homosexual nephew, Hans, sent to the Dachau concentration camp where he was forced to wear a pink triangle and was eventually executed.

As the war turned against Germany, Himmler sought peace negotiations with the Western allies in order to carry on the fight against the Soviet Union. Labelled a traitor by Hitler, he was stripped of all his responsibilities.

Sergeant Hitzinger

After Germany’s surrender, Himmler tried to escape detention, dressing up as an army sergeant under the name Heinrich Hitzinger, shaving off his moustache and sporting a patch over one eye. Caught by the British near the northern German town of Lüneburg, Heinrich Himmler committed suicide by poison before the British could bring him to trial. His final words, said as he swallowed the poison, were, ‘I am Heinrich Himmler’. He was buried in an unmarked grave. His death mask is on display at London’s Imperial War Museum.

Gudrun Burwitz

Heinrich Himmler was married in 1928 to Margarete Boden. They had one child, a girl, Gudrun, born 8 August 1929. (Pictured is Gudrun with her parents). Gudrun Burwitz, who died, aged 88, in 2018, had been a member of the Stille Hilfe (‘Silent Help’) organization since its inception in 1951, an organization that helped, and continues to help, former SS members. The ‘Princess of Nazism’, as she was once described, remained committed to aiding former National Socialists and neo-Nazis to the very end.

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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Goebbels and the First World War

One imagines there’s a degree of envy here – born on 29 October 1897, Joseph Goebbels was old enough to fight in the First World War but was rejected due to his clubfoot. (Throughout his life he had to wear a special shoe to compensate for his shorter leg.) After the war, he sometimes liked to pretend that his disability was in fact a war wound. In his novel, Michael, in common with Flisges, sees active service on the Eastern Front during the Great War; Michael’s war record a reflection of Goebbels’ wishful thinking.

Michael returns to a democratic Germany, seeking revolution and answers, but not sure where to find it. Michael is a socialist and a Christian, attempting to write a play about Jesus (as indeed Goebbels had) in which he describes Jesus as one of the greatest men to have lived.

Goebbels in Love

While at college, Michael falls in love with a Hertha Holk (based on Goebbels’ first but unrequited love, Anka Stalherm, whom he met at Heidelberg University, from where he would receive a doctorate in literature). After their split up, Michael finds work in the mines and just as things are coming together for him, is killed in a mining accident – a fate that had befallen Flisges in July 1923.

One recent review of Michael describes its characters as ‘never rising above their basic two-dimensionality; they are cardboard cut-outs whose greatest glory is to become sounding boards for the author’s lugubrious philosophizing’.

Goebbels’ parents had hoped he’d become a priest (as did Stalin’s mother of her son). But Joseph dreamt of being a writer and wrote numerous plays, poems and articles but Michael was his only novel. His literary aspirations however fell well short of his expectations – Michael was eventually published in 1929 by the Nazi’s own publishing house, Eher-Verlag, but merely on the back of Goebbels’ growing status within the party. Back in the early twenties, unable to make a living as a writer, Goebbels was forced to find employment, working on the stock exchange and as a bank clerk, both of which he loathed.

Both great and simple

Goebbels joined the Nazi Party in 1922, seduced, as many were, by the charisma of its leader, Adolf Hitler. But for a couple of years, Goebbels sided with the more socialist side of the party, a division that momentarily threatened to split the movement. ‘I no longer fully believe in Hitler,’ Goebbels confided to his diary. Hitler went on the offensive and through a mixture of bullying and charm, healed the rift. Goebbels was left reeling and utterly in awe of Hitler. From then on, he devoted his life to his leader and remained loyal to the last. ‘Adolf Hitler, I love you because you are both great and simple at the same time. What one calls a genius.’

In 1926, just four years after joining the party, Goebbels was made Gauleiter of Berlin and, in 1929, appointed the party’s propaganda minister where he edited a weekly newspaper called Der Angriff (The Assault). In 1933, following Hitler’s assumption of power, he became the Reich Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.

Goebbels married Magda Ritschel on 19 December 1931, with Hitler as a witness. They were to have six children, all of whose names began with an H in honour of Hitler.

Following Hitler’s suicide on 30 April 1945, Goebbels succeeded him as chancellor, a post he was to retain for a single day. With the Red Army bearing down on Berlin and defeat inevitable, Goebbels and his wife couldn’t bear the thought of their children living in a post-Hitler world. Thus, on 1 May, they drugged up their children, aged four to twelve, on morphine, then, with the help of a doctor, crushed ampules of cyanide into their mouths. The girls had ribbons tied in their hair. A couple of hours later, Magda and Goebbels walked out into the Reich Chancellery garden. Goebbels shot his wife and then himself.

In 1987, the novel was published for the first time in English, published by Amok Press.

The auction house, Alexander Autographs, had hoped the book would sell for $10,000 to $12,000 (£6,400 to £7,600). However, it remains unsold. But it did sell Hitler’s accounts book, a 175-page handwritten ledger covering his expenses during the last year of his life.

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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The death of Hitler: In January 1945, with the Soviet Red Army bearing down on Germany, Hitler left his HQ in East Prussia and moved back to Berlin and into the Reich Chancellery. A month later, he went underground into the Chancellery’s air-raid shelter, a cavern of dimly-lit rooms made of solid, high-quality concrete.

Hitler’s Health 

During his last few months, Hitler’s health deteriorated rapidly. In February 1945, after so many years of shouting and screaming, he had to have an operation on his vocal cords which, following the operation, obliged him to stay silent for a whole week.

Despite the implorations of his staff, Hitler refused to leave Berlin, and finally, realising the war was truly lost, he decided to end his life. Shuffling around with a stoop, Hitler looked much older than his fifty-six years. A new pain in his eye required daily doses of cocaine drops, and, perhaps from the onset of Parkinson’s disease, his left hand shook constantly. His eyesight had become so poor he had to have his documents written in extra-large print on specially-made ‘Fuhrer’ typewriters.

He ate poorly – devouring large portions of cake. He’d fallen out with many of his senior colleagues – in particular Hermann Goring and Heinrich Himmler, both of whom he accused of treachery and ordered to be arrested on sight and court-martialled. Joseph Goebbels, however, remained loyal to the last, broadcasting to the nation, demanding greater effort and sacrifice against the enemy.

Hitler the General

In his final days, Hitler ordered a scorched-earth policy throughout eastern Germany and the destruction of anything that could be of use to the Soviets. What happened to the German citizen was not of Hitler’s concern – as far as Hitler was concerned, they had proved themselves unworthy of him.

From within the bunker, Hitler continued to dictate operations but his grip on reality had deserted him. He refused to listen to the glum reports from the front and ordered a constant stream of counterattacks deploying non-existent troops and refusing the troops that did exist room to retreat and re-group.

On his 56th (and final) birthday on 20 April 1945, a group of nineteen Hitler Youth boys lined up in the Chancellery garden for Hitler to inspect and decorate with Iron Crosses. Lined up from the eldest to the youngest, Hitler, with his shaking left hand behind his back, shook hands with each child, pinching the cheek of the last, the youngest child, a 12-year-old boy called Alfred Czech.  ‘The Führer shook my hand,’ said Mr Czech decades later, ‘then he pinched my left cheek. He told me, “Keep it up!” I certainly had the feeling that I had done something remarkable.’ Hitler delivered a short speech and thanked them for their bravery before shuffling back into the bunker. It was to be Hitler’s last appearance in public.

Hitler and Eva

A week later, just past midnight on 29 April, in a ten-minute ceremony, Hitler married his long-term partner, Eva Braun (pictured). Twenty-three years his junior, the German people knew nothing of her. Her presence, although not a secret amongst the Nazi hierarchy, was not something Hitler wished publicized lest it should diminish the adoration of Germany’s women. Goebbels and Martin Bormann stood as witnesses as a hastily-found registrar nervously asked the couple whether they were of pure Aryan descent and free of hereditary diseases.

That night, following the subdued and rather surreal marital celebrations, Hitler dictated his last political testament and private will to his secretary, where, in the former, he drew up the makeup of the government following his death. The admiral, Karl Donitz, was named as his successor, not as ‘Fuhrer’ but as president, and Goebbels as Chancellor.

Death of Hitler

That same day, Hitler made preparations for his death. 200 litres of benzene were delivered into the bunker. Hitler insisted that his body be burnt, not wanting his corpse to finish up in Soviet hands like an “exhibit in a cabinet of curiosities”. He also ordered the testing of the newly-arrived batch of cyanide capsules. The chosen victim was Hitler’s much-loved Alsatian dog, Blondi.

On 30 April, with the Soviets only 300 metres away, Goebbels tried one last time to convince the Fuhrer to leave Berlin but Hitler had already made it plain a week earlier, bellowing at his generals, “If you gentlemen think I’m going to leave Berlin you are very much mistaken. I’d rather blow my brains out”.

Near four o’clock, after a round of farewells, Hitler and his wife of forty hours retired to his study. Hitler wore upon his tunic, his Iron Cross (First Class) and his Wounded Badge of the First World War. His entourage waited nervously outside. A shot was heard. Hitler had shot himself through the right temple. Braun was also dead. She had swallowed the cyanide. The pistol Hitler had used was the same one that his niece, Geli Raubal, had used when she committed suicide almost 14 years before.

The bodies, covered in blankets, were carried out into the Chancellery garden. There, with artillery exploding around them and neighbouring buildings ablaze, Hitler’s wishes were honoured – the benzene was poured on the corpses and set alight. With the bodies blazing, the entourage gave one final Hitler salute before scampering back into the bunker.

The official announcement, the following day, stated that “Hitler had fallen at his command post fighting to his last breath against Bolshevism and for Germany”.

He had come to power as German Chancellor, aged 43, in January 1933. But with the death of Hitler, the Third Reich, which was meant to last a thousand years, had come to an end after just twelve.

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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Yakov Stalin joined the Red Army at the outbreak of war in the East in June 1941, serving as a lieutenant in the artillery. On the first day of the war, his father told him to ‘Go and fight’.

Peace-loving and gentle

His half-sister, Svetlana Alliluyeva, the daughter of Stalin, and his second wife, Nadezhda, claimed in her book, Twenty Letters to a Friend, that Yakov never ‘took any advantage [as a soldier]; never made even the slightest attempt to avoid danger… Since my father, moreover, hadn’t any use for him and everybody knew it, no one in the higher echelons of the army gave him special treatment.’ Yakov, according to Svetlana, was ‘peace-loving, gentle and extremely quiet.’ But he wasn’t fond of his half-brother Vasily (Svetlana’s brother) and disliked his ‘penchant for profanity’, and once turned on Vasily with his fists ‘like a lion’.

On 16 July, within a month of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Yakov was captured and taken prisoner. Stalin considered all prisoners as traitors to the motherland and those that surrendered he demonized as ‘malicious deserters’. ‘There are no prisoners of war,’ he once said, ‘only traitors to their homeland’.

Certainly, Yakov, by all accounts, felt that he had failed his father. Under interrogation, he admitted that he had tried to shoot himself. His father probably would have preferred it if he had.

Stick your bayonets in the earth

Families of PoWs, or deserters, faced the harshest consequences for the failings of their sons or husbands – arrested and exiled. Yakov may have been Stalin’s son but his family was not to be spared. He was married to a Jewish girl, Julia. Stalin had managed to overcome his innate anti-Semitism and grew to be quite fond of his daughter-in-law. Nonetheless, following Yakov’s capture, Julia was arrested, separated from her three-year-old daughter, and sent to the gulag. After two years, Stalin sanctioned her release but she remained forever traumatised by the experience.

The Germans attempted to win over Yakov, offering to introduce him to Hermann Goring – but he remained steadfast and refused to co-operate. But although the Germans were unable to recruit Stalin’s son they still made propaganda capital out of him, dropping leaflets in the Soviet Union that claimed that the Great Leader’s son had surrendered and was feeling ‘alive and well’. ‘Follow the example of Stalin’s son’, the Germans urged Soviet soldiers, ‘stick your bayonets in the earth’.

Yakov was placed in a more spacious hut than others within the camp and shared a bedroom with the nephew of Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister. In the adjoining bedroom were four British POWs, and the atmosphere between them all was strained. Yakov taunted the Brits for standing to attention when spoken to by the German officers, implying that they were cowards, and calling the British people as a whole ‘Hitler’s puppets’. One of the British prisoners was an Irishman, Red Cushing, who described his time as a POW with Yakov Stalin in an interview with the Sunday Times in 1980.

A Marshal for a Lieutenant

In 1943, Stalin was offered the chance to have his son back. The Germans had been defeated at Stalingrad and their Field Marshal, Friedrich Paulus, was taken prisoner by the Soviets, their highest-ranking capture of the war. The Germans offered a swap – Paulus for Yakov. Stalin refused, saying, ‘I will not trade a marshal for a lieutenant’. As harsh it may seem, Stalin’s reasoning did contain a logic – why should his son be freed when the sons of other Soviet families suffered – ‘what would other fathers say?’ asked Stalin.

Death

On 14 April 1943, the 36-year-old Yakov Stalin died. The Germans maintained they shot him while he was trying to escape. They released a photograph showing his bullet-riddled body caught in barbed wire.

But it is more likely that Yakov committed suicide by throwing himself onto the electric fence. After two years of incarceration and deprivation, the news of the Katyn massacre, and his father’s responsibility for it, weighed heavily on Yakov’s conscience. Stalin had ordered the murder of 15,000 Polish officers in the woods of Katyn in May 1940.  The discovery of the mass grave in March 1943 was heavily publicised by the Germans. Yakov, who had befriended Polish inmates, was distraught by the news. ‘Look what you bastards did to these men. What kind of people are you?’ said a German officer to him.

But it was an argument over toilets, according to Red Cushing, that was the final straw. Insults and fists were thrown. Then, said Cushing, ‘I saw Yakov running about as if he were insane. He just ran straight onto the wire. There was a huge flash and all the searchlights suddenly went on. I knew that was the end of him.’

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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At the time Hitler had taken upon himself the responsibility of looking after his 21-year-old niece, Geli Raubal. The exact relationship between uncle and niece has never been properly ascertained except that Hitler was overly-possessive and jealous of the company she kept. On 18 September 1931, Raubal committed suicide by shooting herself with Hitler’s pistol.

Hitler’s relationship with Eva Braun began soon after Raubal’s death and possibly before. Raubal’s jealousy of Braun has been mooted as a possible cause of her suicide.

The Invisible Woman

Germany, as a nation, never knew of Braun’s existence as Hitler went to great lengths to keep her hidden from view. He was, as he often remarked, primarily wedded to the German people and wanted to maintain his popularity amongst German women, whose adoration for Hitler sometimes contained a sexual dimension.

Thus the relationship proved difficult for Braun who was devoted to the Fuhrer. Twice she tried to commit suicide, once by shooting herself, the second time by poison. Neither occasion could be regarded as a serious attempt at ending her life but a desperate cry for attention. Concerned, Hitler amply provided for her so that materially at least Braun was very comfortable. But still, she remained marginalised. She spent much of her time with Hitler in his mountain retreat, the Berchtesgaden, but was only reluctantly accepted by the wives of other senior Nazis. When visitors and dignities arrived Braun had to make herself scarce.

She had no interest in politics and spent time with her friends or, if alone, reading romantic novels and watching films. Braun liked to wear make-up, smoke and sunbathe nude – all of which Hitler thoroughly disproved of but, surprisingly, lacked the assertiveness to stop. Albert Speer later described Braun at the Berchtesgaden as ‘silent and miserable’.

Even unto death

But she remained devoted. In 1944 Braun wrote to Hitler, ‘From our first meeting I swore to follow you anywhere even unto death.’ True to her word, in 1945 she joined Hitler in the bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery in Berlin and despite many opportunities to evacuate remained at his side.

On 28 April 1945, Hitler finally married Braun. Joseph Goebbels and Martin Bormann stood as witnesses as the hastily-found registrar asked the marrying couple whether they were of pure Aryan descent and free of any hereditary diseases. The reception was brief and awkward.

The following day. Hitler dictated his personal will and testament. In it, he wrote,

‘I have now decided, before the closing of my earthly career, to take as my wife that girl who, after many years of faithful friendship, entered, of her own free will, the practically besieged town in order to share her destiny with me. At her own desire, she goes as my wife with me into death. It will compensate us for what we both lost through my work in the service of my people’.

Forty hours after becoming husband and wife, with the Soviet Red Army only metres away, the couple committed suicide – Hitler by shooting himself through the temple. The pistol he used was the same as his niece had used almost 14 years before. Braun bit into a cyanide capsule. She was 33.

The bodies, covered in blankets, were carried out into the Chancellery garden. There, with artillery exploding around them and neighbouring buildings ablaze, Hitler’s wishes were honoured – benzene was poured on the corpses and set alight. With the bodies blazing, the entourage gave one final Hitler salute before scampering back into the bunker.

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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Prague Spring

The Prague Spring had been led by Czechoslovakia’s new communist party chairman, Alexander Dubcek, appointed in January 1968. Although claiming to be loyal to his Soviet masters in Moscow, Dubcek ushered in a period of political and cultural freedom unheard of in the previous twenty years of Czechoslovakian communist rule. The Soviet leadership, under Leonid Brezhnev (pictured), became increasingly concerned with what they considered Dubcek’s treachery and Czechoslovakia’s counterrevolution and demanded he reversed the reforms.

While outwardly agreeing and promising to compromise, Dubcek did nothing to halt the growing movement of liberalisation. Dubcek had gone too far, and so Brezhnev decided to act. On 21 August 1968, Soviet troops appeared in Czechoslovakia and on the streets of Prague to quash the ‘Prague Spring’ and to reassert stricter communist rule. Dubcek was initially arrested, restored briefly to power, albeit heavily monitored, before being replaced by Gustav Husak, a hardline alternative, loyal to Brezhnev and the communist cause. The Prague Spring was over.

The country had had a taste of freedom and now, during the bleak days of communist rule, the loss of freedom was a bitter pill to swallow. It was in this atmosphere of hopelessness and demoralisation that Jan Palach made the ultimate sacrifice.

Jan Palach

Born in a village thirty miles from Prague on 11 August 1948, Jan Palach’s parents had owned a sweet factory which was confiscated by the communists. Young Jan was fond of chess, historical novels and running. A school friend described him as having a ‘nice and friendly nature … quiet, pensive, and very well-read.’

As a student, Palach studied history and economics at Charles University in Prague. During the summer of 1968, he was visiting the Soviet Union, returning to Prague only four days before the Soviet invasion of his country. What he witnessed angered him, as it did most of his peers, and he took part in protests and strikes against the communist regime. But these demonstrations were achieving little and Palach began thinking up ways of staging a more radical protest that would stir the hearts of his countrymen, ideas that included occupying the premises of the radio station and calling for a general strike. He soon came up with the more drastic idea of self-immolation and together, with his friends, they struck a pact to set themselves on fire. Palach was the first but by no means the last.

Self-immolation

In his suicide note, entitled ‘Torch no.1’, of which Palach wrote and posted four copies to various friends, he demanded the end of press censorship and called on the people to strike. Then, 16 January 1969, on his way to Wenceslas Square, he bought two plastic containers and filled them with petrol.

Several people witnessed Palach’s fatal act. At 3 pm, he removed his coat and set himself on fire. With his clothes in flames, he jumped over a railing and ran towards the St Wenceslas statue and was almost run over by a passing tram. When he fell, passers-by tried to smother the fire with their coats. An ambulance appeared and rushed the still conscious Palach, with 85 per cent burns, to hospital.

The hospital transferred Palach to a burns clinic which was soon inundated with news reporters and policemen, the latter keen to know who his accomplices were. The doctor in charge of Palach managed to keep them at bay, permitting only his mother and older brother to visit.

The doctor quoted Palach, saying that the protest ‘was not so much in opposition to the Soviet occupation, but the demoralization which was setting in; that people were not only giving up, but giving in. And he wanted to stop that demoralization.’

Jan Palach died of his burns at 3.30 pm on Sunday, 19 January 1969.

Funeral and Protests

A friend of Palach’s, a student sculptor, managed to make a death mask of Palach’s face. Soon, students and young people gathered under the St Wenceslas statue on Wenceslas Square, carrying banners bearing large photos of Palach and protesting in the form of a collective hunger strike. They managed four days in the winter cold. A shrine to Palach was erected on the square with photographs and candles in his memory. His death mask was put on public display.

For six days, as Palach’s casket lay in Charles University, tens of thousands of people came to pay their last respects. His funeral took place on 25 January 1969, attended by up to 750,000 people and providing a perfect opportunity for a mass demonstration against the regime. Protests and services of remembrance took place across the country, with people shouting anti-communist and anti-Soviet slogans.

The authorities allowed these demonstrations and marches to take place, sensing the need of the people to voice their discontent. But soon, marches were broken up as the regime reasserted its control. Palach’s grave in Prague, which was attracting far too many visitors, had become a shrine adorned with flowers, candles and poems. Guards were placed at the graveside to deter further visitors. The authorities eventually removed the headstone and sent Palach’s ashes to his mother in his home village. It took her a year to receive permission to bury her son’s ashes. In October 1990, following the fall of the Czechoslovakian state, the ashes were moved back to Prague.

Jan Zajic

Palach’s act was copied numerous times in the coming months, most notably by 18-year-old Jan Zajic who, on 25 February 1969, also set himself on fire. In his suicide note, entitled ‘Torch no.2’, Zajic wrote, ‘I am not doing this to be mourned, nor to be famous, and I am not out of my mind, either. With this act, I want to give you the courage to finally resist letting yourself be pushed around by a few dictators.’

Following the fall of communism in Czechoslovakia, a bronze cross (pictured) honouring both Palach and Jan Zajic was embedded into the ground on Wenceslas Square, as if melting into the pavement, on the exact spot where Jan Palach had staged his desperate protest.

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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At the time of his birth, Goring’s parents were stationed in Haiti, his father working for the German consul there. His mother returned to Germany to give birth, then promptly returned to Haiti, leaving baby Hermann with a friend, not to see her child again for three years.

After the First World War, Goring worked as a commercial pilot in Denmark and Sweden, where he met his future wife, the Swedish baroness Carin von Kantzow. They married in Munich on 3 February 1923. Serving as a Prussian deputy in the German Reichstag, he met the young Adolf Hitler and, soon afterwards, in 1922, joined the fledging Nazi Party.

Austria

A year later, on 8 November 1923, Goring was shot in the leg and badly injured during the Munich Putsch, Hitler’s failed attempt to seize power by force. From there, together with his wife, Goring escaped to Austria. In Innsbruck, his wound was operated on but such was the pain he was given morphine, thereby starting an addiction that would last until his final days. At one point, during his forced sojourn in Austria, and later Italy, where he met Italy’s fascist leader, Benito Mussolini, Goring’s addiction had become so severe he had to be incarcerated in a mental hospital, occasionally having to be restrained by means of a straitjacket. In 1927, after four years away, Goring returned to Germany.

Elections

Following the national elections of May 1928, Goring entered the Reichstag, occupying one of only twelve seats won by the Nazis (out of a total of 491).

Following the more successful elections of July 1932, in which the Nazis gained 230 seats, Goring was made president of the Reichstag. Then, following Hitler’s appointment as chancellor on 30 January 1933, Goring established the first concentration camps for the imprisonment of the Nazi’s political opponents and founded the Nazi secret police, the feared Gestapo. (He ceded control of the Gestapo to Heinrich Himmler in 1934).

Goring’s wife, Carin, died on 17 October 1931, and four years later, on 10 April 1935, Goring married for the second time. His second wife, Emmy (pictured), bore him his only child, a girl called Edda (rumoured to have been named after Mussolini’s daughter), born 2 June 1938, who is still alive today and believed to be living in South Africa.

‘You can call me Meyer’

Goring helped Hitler in destroying the SA and liquidating its leader, Ernst Rohm (pictured), during the Night of the Long Knives in June 1934. Hitler repaid Goring’s loyalty by appointing him in 1935 Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, the German Air Force. The following year he was also appointed Economics Minister. Goring’s grasp of economics was questionable but, with Hitler’s prompting, he introduced the Four-Year-Plan, a more aggressive policy to prepare Germany for war.

In August 1939, a month before the outbreak of the Second World War, Göring boasted about the strength of the Luftwaffe, declaring, ‘Not a single bomb will fall on the Ruhr. If an enemy plane reaches the Ruhr, my name is not Hermann Göring, you can call me Meyer.’

Initially, Goring’s Luftwaffe enjoyed a string of successes, playing crucial roles during the Nazi invasions of Poland and France during the first year of the war. However, reverses during the Battle of Britain and on the Eastern Front, particularly the Luftwaffe’s failure to relieve stranded German troops trapped in Stalingrad, saw the decline of Goring’s influence. His Meyer boast came back to haunt him as, later in the war, the Luftwaffe failed to prevent the bombing of German cities, leaving German civilians to suffer terribly under the barrage of bombing inflicted by the Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command, most notably in Cologne, Hamburg and, in February 1945, in Dresden.

Goring and his medals

Goring enjoyed a lavish and wealthy lifestyle. He collected art, much of it stolen from Jewish collectors, adored his uniforms and loved receiving and bestowing medals. In October 1938, he proudly presented the Grand Service Cross of the Golden Eagle award to the US aviation hero, Charles Lindbergh. (In 1941, Lindbergh was to suggest to President Roosevelt that the US struck a ‘neutrality pact’ with Hitler). Goring was the only ever recipient of Germany’s highest military award for heroism, the Grand Cross to the Iron Cross, awarded on 19 July 1940 in recognition of his services with the Luftwaffe. (Days before his suicide on 30 April 1945, Hitler revoked Goring’s medal).

Anti-Semitic

Although not so furiously anti-Semitic as most of his colleagues (his godfather and mother’s lover, Hermann Epenstein, was of Jewish ancestry) Goring’s role certainly accelerated Hitler’s desired destruction of Germany’s Jewish population. Following the nationwide pogrom against the Jews, Kristallnacht, on the night of 8 – 9 November 1938, Goring didn’t see why German insurance companies should have to pay out and so ordered the Jewish community to collectively pay compensation to the tune of one billion marks. (Also, the fine was seen as a form of compensation for the Jewish murder of the Parisian-based Nazi diplomat, whose assassination had provided Berlin with the pretext to stage the pogrom.)

It was Goring who, in July 1941, ordered Reinhard Heydrich to prepare a set of proposals on how to deal with the ‘Jewish Question’; an order that led, six months later, to Heydrich chairing the one-day Wannsee Conference, in which the plans for the Final Solution were officially adopted.

Downfall

In 1941, having made Goring Reichsmarschall, ‘Reich Marshal of the Greater German Reich’, Hitler named him as his deputy and successor. In the event, in his last days, Hitler declared Goring a traitor for having suggested that he take full command, and stripped him of all his decorations, titles and offices, and placed him under house arrest. In his last will and testament, dictated the day before his suicide, Hitler stripped Goring of his party membership.

Following Germany’s final defeat and surrender, Goring surrendered to the Americans. Goring was tried at the post-war Nuremberg trials charged with various accounts, including war crimes and crimes against humanity. (Picture: Goring is on the front row, far left. Seated next to him is Rudolph Hess).

After a trial lasting 218 days, during which he was finally cured of his morphine addiction, Goring was found guilty. The judgment described his guilt as ‘unique in its enormity’. He was sentenced to hang. Goring’s plea for death by firing squad, a ‘soldier’s death’, was refused and two hours before his execution he took his own life using poison that had either been smuggled into him or hidden all the while in a container of pomade. He was 53.

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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