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The Nuremberg Trials: the real history behind the post-WW2 tribunal that brought Nazi leaders to justice
A new film, starring Russell Crowe and Rami Malek, dramatises the Allies’ postwar quest to hold the surviving leaders of the German Reich to account at the Nuremberg Trials. Roger Moorhouse shares what really happened inside the courtroom where modern international justice was born
In the autumn of 1945, in a bombed-out Germany still reeling from defeat and occupation, the victorious Allies launched a remarkable experiment in international justice: the Nuremberg Trials. The first of these, conducted by the International Military Tribunal (IMT) between 20 November 1945 and 1 October 1946, was convened by the four major Allied powers: the United States, the United Kingdom, France and the Soviet Union. It was established under the London Agreement and Charter of 8 August 1945, which created the IMT and defined its authority. What were the Nuremberg Trials? The purpose of the Nuremberg Trials was to hold the senior surviving leaders of the defeated German Reich accountable for their crimes: for aggressive war-making, gross violations of the laws of war (war crimes) and for what was then – in international law – a new category: “crimes against humanity”. In essence, the Nuremberg Trials represented a watershed in the history of international justice. Their significance lies not only in the punishment of high‐profile Nazi leaders but in the very idea that state actors and military commanders could be held to account before a tribunal created by victorious powers, under new international legal standards. Read more | Life in Nazi Germany They raised profound questions about justice, victors’ rights, legal innovation and moral precedent. They were not simple theatrical show trials, nor were they flawless, but they marked a deliberate choice by the Allies to pursue legality over vengeance, to document evil rather than simply bury it, and to assert that even leaders are not above the law. Their legacy is significant: they laid the foundation for international criminal law, inspired the later Genocide Convention (adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948), and provided a public accounting for the Third Reich’s atrocities. The trials, which opened in November 1945, are also the subject of a new film entitled Nuremberg, starring Rami Malek and Russell Crowe. Who was on trial at Nuremberg? At the first and most famous of the Nuremberg Trials (the IMT), 24 major figures from the military and political elite of the Third Reich were indicted. Among them were: Hermann Göring, Reichsmarschall, head of the Luftwaffe and Hitler’s designated successor Joachim von Ribbentrop, foreign minister Rudolf Hess, the former deputy führer Wilhelm Keitel, field marshal and chief of the OKW (Armed Forces High Command) Ernst Kaltenbrunner, senior SS officer and head of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) Alfred Rosenberg, ideologue of the Nazi regime Hans Frank, governor-general of occupied Poland Wilhelm Frick, interior minister of Nazi Germany and then Reich protector for Bohemia and Moravia Julius Streicher, former editor of the newspaper Der Stürmer and a rabid Nazi propagandist Albert Speer, minister for armaments and war production Fritz Sauckel, plenipotentiary for labour deployment, responsible for Germany’s forced labour procurement Karl Dönitz, former head of the navy and Hitler’s successor as head of state of Nazi Germany Of the 24 names originally indicted, three were absent when the trial started. Martin Bormann, Hitler’s former Nazi party secretary, had not been found (in truth, he had died in the battle for Berlin) and so was tried in absentia. Meanwhile Robert Ley, head of the German Labour Front, took his own life before the trial started, and Gustav Krupp, head of the Krupp industrial conglomerate, was deemed unfit to stand on the grounds of senility. Why were the Nuremberg Trials held in Nuremberg? The decision to hold the trials in the city of Nuremberg (known as Nürnberg in German) was both practical and deeply symbolic. On one hand, the city’s Palace of Justice had survived the war relatively intact, with a large courtroom capable of holding the proceedings and an adjacent prison in which the accused could be securely housed. On the other hand, Nuremberg had been the site of the Nazi party’s huge annual rallies and thus one of the locations most synonymous with the Nazi movement and its propaganda. In addition, holding the trial in the heart of former German territory – rather than abroad – reinforced the idea of a public accounting for Nazi crimes. The Nuremberg Trials were intended to make a deliberate political and moral statement: the former epicentre of the Nazi regime would become the place of judgment. Were the verdicts in the Nuremberg Trials a foregone conclusion? The question of whether the verdicts of the Nuremberg Trials were inevitable is a complex one. Of course, the scale of evidence assembled by the prosecutors was overwhelming: including film footage, photographs, documents and the material gleaned from the cross-examination of survivors and witnesses. Nonetheless, the legal machinery of the trial was novel. International law for crimes against humanity and aggressive war had never previously been applied in this way, so the legal basis was less than entirely sound. Some have argued that the trial invented post-facto standards (i.e. crimes defined after the events) or stretched legal concepts. Indeed, critics at the time and since have questioned whether full impartiality was even possible, given the severity of the crimes under consideration and the fact that the victors were also sitting as judges and prosecutors. Read more | Why did the Allies win the Second World War? Pragmatically, though, the notion of a ‘foregone conclusion’ must be qualified: among the 22 defendants tried by the IMT, three were acquitted. Furthermore, the sentences handed down for the remainder ranged from death to long prison terms. So there was clearly scope for a degree of differentiation in the judgments. Overall, given the nature of the crimes and the vengeful political climate, there was always a strong likelihood that convictions would follow. Yet the trial still required enormous research, the preparation and presentation of evidence, legal argument and defence representation. Though the expectation of guilt for many of the defendants was high, the verdicts were not a foregone conclusion. Why didn’t they just summarily execute the Nazis? There were, perhaps, some compelling arguments at the time for immediate execution or summary justice – after all, the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime were immense, and their crimes had often been blatant. But the Allies rejected this route, and for a number of reasons. The first was that of legitimacy. Stalin famously told Churchill at the Teheran Conference in 1943 that he favoured the summary execution of as many as 100,000 leading Nazis so that Germany would be unable to plan another war. Instead of such a brutal course of action, however, the victorious Allies opted for a very public trial so as to ensure that the Germans would not be able to claim that the admission of war guilt had been extracted from them under duress. Then there was the rule of law. The London Agreement and Charter, which had established the legal and procedural basis for the trials, had emphasised that due process would be applied. The Allies were adamant that – unlike the regime whose surviving representatives they were trying – they were wedded to the principle of lawful justice, not simple vengeance. Read more | Your guide to the Yalta and Potsdam conferences, 1945 Thirdly, the Allies found themselves restrained by moral and political caution. Collective punishment or mass executions without trial would violate the foundational principles that they hoped to represent and would risk a backlash, which could in turn undermine the postwar reconstruction of Germany. Put simply, the mass execution of SS or Gestapo members would have constituted a crime that would have fundamentally undermined the moral superiority that the Allies had claimed for themselves. Lastly, the Allies saw that there was a need for the collection and presentation of evidence of Nazi atrocities. The trial allowed for the Nazi leadership’s crimes to be publicly documented, recorded and exhibited for posterity. The visual evidence, the courtroom transcripts and the verdicts were all to be added to the historical record. So, rather than a swift vengeance, the Allies chose the path of legal process: trial, judgment, execution or imprisonment. This was not intended to relativise the crimes, or to lessen the moral weight of the sentences handed down; if anything, it amplified them by setting a solid legal precedent. Nazi Germany | A short course from HistoryExtra Academy Member exclusive | Everything you need to know about Nazi Germany, guided by historian, author and broadcaster Laurence Rees. Explore the course now Did any of the defendants get acquitted? Yes. Of the 22 defendants who stood trial at the IMT, 12 received death sentences, seven received long prison sentences and three were acquitted. The latter category comprised Hjalmar Schacht, an economist and banker who had largely been responsible for the German economic recovery after 1933; Franz von Papen, a former diplomat and chancellor of Germany, who had belonged to the conservative clique that had brought Hitler to power; and Hans Fritzsche, a renowned broadcaster and the former head of radio propaganda. These acquittals demonstrated that the tribunal did not simply rubber-stamp guilty verdicts across the board. Importantly, the judgments handed down showed a degree of objectivity and impartiality. How quickly were the trials carried out? By modern standards, the timing of the IMT’s proceedings is striking. The trial began on 20 November 1945 and the verdicts were handed down between 30 September and 1 October 1946. In that sense, then, the trial moved extraordinarily swiftly given the magnitude of the task at hand, which included assembling the necessary evidence, interrogating and cross-examining the defendants and organising the necessary interpreters to translate the court sessions into English, Russian, French and German. Following the verdicts, the executions of the condemned took place on 16 October 1946. This means that the major war criminals were tried, judged and executed within roughly a year – a remarkable speed for such landmark international legal proceedings. It is worth noting that the later Nuremberg trials – the US military tribunals held in the city between 1946 and 1949 – considerably extended the timeframe foreseen. What happened to the bodies of the executed Nazis? The bodies were handled with deliberate care and secrecy by the Allied authorities, in part to prevent them becoming objects of glorification or martyrdom. After the IMT verdicts, 12 defendants were sentenced to death. On the morning of 16 October 1946, 10 men were executed by hanging in the gymnasium of Nuremberg prison. Of the remaining two: Martin Bormann was sentenced in absentia, and Hermann Göring had escaped the noose by taking his own life the night before his scheduled execution, using a cyanide capsule that had been smuggled into his cell. Following the hangings, the bodies of the dead were transported to the crematorium of Ostfriedhof cemetery in Munich, where they were cremated. Their ashes were then scattered in the Isar river – a method of disposal that was both pragmatic and symbolic. There were to be no tombs, no monuments and no headstones. Read more | The 1943 battle of Kursk: was it the biggest tank battle in history? The reason for this elaborate procedure was to deny the executed Nazis a grave or resting place that might become a shrine for neo-Nazis or other extremist admirers. It was to prove a prescient precaution. In 1988, the body of former deputy führer Rudolf Hess – who had died while serving a life sentence the previous year – was interred in a provincial cemetery in Bavaria. However, the attentions of fanatics and neo-Nazis meant that his remains were removed in 2011 and subsequently cremated. His grave was then destroyed. Was anyone else tried after Nuremberg? Yes. While the first IMT trial is certainly the most famous, it was by no means the only one that took place in the wake of the war. From December 1946 to April 1949, the United States (in its occupation zone) conducted 12 further trials of war criminals in the same courthouse in Nuremberg. These are collectively known as the ‘Subsequent Nuremberg Trials’ or the Nuremberg Military Tribunals (NMT). These trials covered a broader range of defendants: SS and police leaders, industrialists (e.g. those who had used forced labour), judges (in the Judges’ Trial), doctors (the Doctors’ Trial), bureaucrats (the Ministries’ Trial) and others. All of them were people who, in various ways, had enabled the machinery of Nazi genocide and oppression. Read more | Was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the US in WW2 justified? In total, some 199 defendants were tried at Nuremberg (IMT and NMT), resulting in 161 convictions and 37 death sentences. Moreover, war crimes trials continued elsewhere and for decades: in West Germany, in eastern Europe, and, in the most recent years, in the prosecutions of the last surviving perpetrators for their roles in Nazi crimes. The legal legacy of Nuremberg thus continues to this day. The trials set in motion global efforts to hold individuals accountable for the crimes committed by numerous odious regimes, and many more similar trials have followed. For more content like this, check out the best historical movies of all time as chosen by historians and ranked by you, history TV shows and films to stream tonight, and our picks of the new history TV and radio released in the UK this week
Terror in the deep: how Hitler's U-boats pushed Britain to the brink
Did German U-boats conduct a ‘clean’ campaign during the Second World War? Or were they guilty of routinely murdering survivors in the water? Roger Moorhouse weighs the evidence
On the night of 13 March 1944, the Greek-registered steamship SS Peleus was en route from Freetown to Buenos Aires when she was hit amidships by two torpedoes, launched by a German U-boat, U-852. The twin-masted merchantman, of around 5,000 tons, swiftly began to sink, her internal bulkheads ruptured by the detonations. Within three minutes, the Peleus disappeared below the surface, leaving the surviving members of her 39-strong crew clinging to rafts and flotsam in the darkness. As sinkings go during the naval war, it was unremarkable, one might even say routine. But what followed would set it apart. Soon after, U-852 surfaced close to the debris field, hoping to identify her prey and glean some information. Her captain, 27-year-old Kapitänleutnant Heinz‑Wilhelm Eck, ordered one of his men – who spoke some English – to come up to the bow to question one of the survivors. After learning the identity of his target, Eck gave the order for U-852 to move away. But then he changed his mind. Eck was nervous. Prior to his departure from port, he had been given a lecture from his superiors on the perils of passing through the Atlantic Narrows, around Ascension, and was told that all four of the previous patrols undertaken by his predecessors had ended with the vessels being sunk. Due to the heightened risk of air attack he was urged to take every precaution to avoid being spotted by enemy aircraft. Even debris from a sinking, it was stressed, could give away his position. Calculating that he could be only some 200 miles away by daybreak, when the wreckage of the Peleus would doubtless be spotted, he made the decision to attempt to destroy the debris. He brought a party of his men up on deck and ordered them to open fire on the rafts and other debris with machine guns. In the moonless night, they were largely firing blind, but the operation continued for hours, with grenades being thrown and U-852’s anti-aircraft gun even being brought to bear. The number killed by these actions is unknown, but only four members of the Peleus’ crew – three Greeks and a Briton – survived among the wreckage. Three of them would endure until they were finally picked up by a Portuguese steamer, more than a month later. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/GettyImages-544740257-CMYKWeb-Ready-8cbb754.jpg" width="4950" height="3300" alt="A black and white photograph showing a row of young men sitting in a pew in court. The two men in the foreground are looking at each other, and one of them has his hands resting on top of a walking stick. Behind them, a man in full army uniform is standing, looking serious" title="Heinz‑Wilhelm Eck (left), commander of U-852, is tried for war crimes, October 1945. The following month he was executed by firing squad (Image by Getty Images)" /> A bloody exception It is often assumed that the brutal treatment of the survivors of the Peleus was somehow the norm: that U-boat crews thought little of brutalising, even of murdering, their victims. That certainly was the assumption of Doris Hawkins, a young British nurse who was torpedoed and then picked up by a U-boat in 1941. “We had heard so many atrocity stories,” she later wrote. “We feared a shower of machine gun bullets.” Bearing in mind the atrocities that were routinely committed by German forces elsewhere in the war – especially in eastern Europe – this assumption is entirely understandable. But, if the written records are to be believed, it is also entirely wrong. The example of the Peleus was very much the exception. Indeed, it was the only documented example of a U-boat action in the Second World War resulting in a war crime. Read more | The seaborne invasion: why we must remember the forgotten heroes of D-Day and the battle for Normandy Sceptical readers might question this assertion – and rightly so. For one thing, it is well known that Hitler was instinctively secretive and had a preference for issuing verbal rather than written orders when dealing with sensitive matters. Consequently, at the Nuremberg trials, the prosecution was keen to assert that the available documentary record of the U-boat war was somehow incomplete, or that mendacious amendments could have been made. More than that, given the brutality with which most branches of the German armed forces conducted their war, is it perhaps naïve to imagine that the men of the Kriegsmarine somehow managed to resist both the heat of the moment – and the bloodthirsty rhetoric of their superiors – and refrained from straying into barbarism? Licence to kill? At Nuremberg, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, the erstwhile commander of U-boat forces, rejected robustly the claims that the Germans had somehow covered up atrocities committed during the war at sea. Yet the testimony of Korvettenkapitän Karl-Heinz Moehle, former commander of the 5th U-boat Flotilla, suggested that the culture within the U-boat arm may have been less ‘clean’ than Dönitz was willing to admit. Moehle’s testimony centred around the so-called Laconia Order, Dönitz’s instruction to his crews, issued in 1942, to refrain from assisting shipwrecked crewmen. When he asked his superiors about the implications of the order, Moehle was told that it was a coded instruction to kill survivors. And that’s how he passed it on to his officers, albeit with the caveat that each individual commander had to act according to his own conscience. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/GettyImages-466684659-CMYKWeb-Ready-2d13be1.jpg" width="4867" height="3245" alt="A black and white photograph of a marge ship sinking into the sea" title="SS F.W. Abrams lies stricken in the Atlantic following a U-boat attack, June 1942. For much of 1941 and 42, British shipping losses outpaced production (Image by Getty Images)" /> It is quite possible, then, that there were other atrocities committed by U-boat crews against stricken merchant crewmen, but that circumstances conspired to consign them to oblivion. Perhaps there were no survivors to tell the tale, or the perpetrators were themselves sunk later in their patrol. Absence of evidence, then, should not be confused with evidence of absence. Nonetheless, it is striking that so few examples of atrocities committed by U-boat crews have come to light. And this should prompt the curious to seek to understand why. The reasons why commanders might have resisted the urge to kill survivors – assuming they felt it at all – would have been multi-layered and would doubtless have evolved with time. But a few explanatory factors are worth bearing in mind. Read more | In October 1939, two coffins were wheeled through Edinburgh draped in Nazi flags. But why? For one thing, the typical U‑boat – such as the Type VII – was small and cramped. With its crew of around 50, it had no space to accommodate survivors and only limited capacity to offer material assistance. Bearing that in mind, it is remarkable how often, in the opening phase of the war, U-boat crews assisted the surviving crewmen from the ships that they had sunk, offering food, cigarettes, blankets and a compass bearing. In the most astonishing example, the commander of U-35 opted to take the 28 surviving crewmen of the Greek-registered Diamantis aboard his submarine and sailed more than 30 hours to the beach at Ventry, in western Ireland, where they were then ferried ashore in a dinghy. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/GettyImages-537152831-CMYKWeb-Ready-023b7fd.jpg" width="3708" height="2472" alt="Three men in dark coats and military uniform walk in a triangular formation. The man at the front is looking towards the right of the image" title="Admiral Karl Dönitz (left) claimed that the U-boats waged a ‘clean’ war. But was he being economical with the truth? (Image by Getty Images)" /> Such chivalrous actions could scarcely survive in the age of total war, of course, and after the Laconia Order, all such humanitarian impulses were formally banned by the German naval command. As a result, after the initial phase of the war, contact with survivors was effectively forbidden. By mid‑1942, then – aside from a brief interrogation to confirm the identity of the sunk vessel – U‑boats tended to avoid survivors altogether. The culture within the U‑boat arm is also worth consideration. One should be wary of underestimating the influence of ideology in any arm of the Nazi state, but it is notable that even contemporaries considered that the Kriegsmarine was less ideologically aligned with Nazism than other branches of the armed forces. Hitler himself is said to have complained that he had “a Nazi air force, a Prussian army and a Christian navy”. That quotation, though apocryphal, may nonetheless have had the ring of truth. Crewman Hans Goebeler, aboard U-505, recalled that – on his boat at least – ideology simply didn’t seem to matter: “Who were the Nazis aboard our submarine?” he asked: “I never met one. We were identical to the sailors from every nation who faced the hazards of war and the sea during those years. Party members or not, we performed our duties with professionalism and honour.” Every boat would have had a cross-section of German society aboard, from fervent Nazis to the apolitical and even those who opposed the regime. Yet the question of how far the U-boat arm was indoctrinated is an interesting and complex one. Dönitz himself was a convinced Nazi, who was fiercely loyal to Hitler, and a few of his commanders shared that enthusiasm. But active indoctrination of the U-boat arm appears to have been limited. While other branches of the German armed forces were increasingly subjected to ideological control as the war progressed, this was simply not the case for the navy. Despite his own enthusiasm for Nazism, Dönitz appears to have stopped short of establishing genuine ideological oversight over his men. The office responsible for indoctrination within the navy, for instance, was staffed largely by men without Nazi backgrounds and – given that they were also not permitted to ‘ride along’ on patrol – they were in any case prevented from exerting any real influence over operational units. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/B4832C-CMYKWeb-Ready-bd6dc39.jpg" width="3557" height="2371" alt="A boat is moored at a harbour. On the boat there is a group of men with their hands behind their backs and heads bowed. A young boy sits on the harbourside looking at them. In the background there is a large bridge and a building with a tall column chimney" title="U-boat crews enter Wilhelmshaven to surrender to Allied forces, May 1945. These men had, for the most part, not used the murderous methods employed by their compatriots on the eastern front, writes Roger Moorhouse (Image by Alamy)" /> This doesn’t mean that the U-boat arm was some sort of haven for anti-Nazi thinking or oppositional attitudes. It was not. The Kriegsmarine was far from apolitical, but its leaders held the view that its coordination to Nazi goals was self-evident, a natural corollary to the patriotism and sense of duty that were essential components of their collective identity. Dönitz held the attempts to enforce ideological conformity at arm’s length, not because he disagreed or was minded to resist, but because he considered such measures to be an unnecessary imposition. The Kriegsmarine, he believed, was already wholly on side. We should also keep in mind that there was no single ‘way of war’ practised by the forces of the Third Reich in the Second World War. The murderous methods deployed on the eastern front, for instance, were only rarely in evidence in the west, while the war in the desert, lacking an ideological dimension, tended to be similarly unsullied by atrocities. These differences in behaviour by German forces were not the result of whim or happenstance. Rather, they were contingent on the nature of the enemy and whether Nazi ideology deemed them to be civilised and worthy of respect – as in the west – or to be subhumans slated for extermination, as in the east. The available evidence shows that the naval war, and the submarine war in particular, cleaved more to that western model than to anything else. It is hard to escape the conclusion that the U-boat war does indeed appear to have been the ‘cleanest’ of the theatres of the European conflict, with many more instances of the old fashioned ‘solidarity of the sea’ in evidence than there were examples of atrocities. Moral outrage Such logic cut little ice with the judges at Nuremberg, of course, as Dönitz was found guilty on two of the three charges against him and was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment. As the former commander of the Kriegsmarine, and Hitler’s successor as Reich President, he deserved neither leniency nor sympathy. And, in the first flush of moral outrage over the crimes of Nazism, the Nuremberg judges were inclined towards the view that all Germans were Nazis and that everything that German forces had done was evidence of Nazi barbarism. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/BAL2449488-CMYKWeb-Ready-379e129.jpg" width="4400" height="2933" alt="Captain Daniel V Gallery –pictured on the captured U-505 off the west African coast in June 1944 – condemned the Allies’ postwar prosecution of Karl Dönitz as “barefaced hypocrisy” (Image by Bridgeman Images)" title="Captain Daniel V Gallery –pictured on the captured U-505 off the west African coast in June 1944 – condemned the Allies’ postwar prosecution of Karl Dönitz as “barefaced hypocrisy” (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> Nonetheless, it was a verdict that provoked no little controversy, even from some senior Allied naval officers. US Admiral Daniel V Gallery – who had spent most of the war hunting U-boats – was especially vociferous in his condemnation. Dönitz’s trial, he said, was an “outstanding example of barefaced hypocrisy”, and his conviction was “an insult to our own submariners”. “If the old gentleman ever gets out of jail,” he wrote, “I hope I never meet him. I would have trouble looking him in the eye. The only crime he committed was the crime of almost beating us in a bloody but ‘legal’ fight.” He had a point. Dönitz’s defence at Nuremberg – brilliantly conducted by his lawyer, Otto Kranzbühler – had turned largely on the apparent hypocrisies of the Allies’ accusations, given that they, too, had effectively been carrying out unrestricted submarine warfare for most of the war. To hammer home the point, Kranzbühler had produced an affidavit from Admiral Chester Nimitz, wartime commander-in-chief of the US Pacific Fleet, which asserted that it had been customary for US submarines to attack Japanese merchant ships without warning, and that ‘general principles’ did not permit US submarines to rescue enemy survivors. In short, Nimitz’s testimony implied that the US Navy had conducted its submarine war precisely as Dönitz claimed to have conducted his. The truth on this point was more damning than Kranzbühler could have known. Naval records released in the 1960s would reveal that the crew of the American submarine USS Wahoo had themselves participated in an action not unlike that involving the Peleus. In January 1943, the Wahoo sank the 5,000-ton Japanese troopship Buyo Maru, north of Papua New Guinea, which had been carrying Japanese soldiers and nearly 500 PoWs from the British Indian army. In the aftermath, as Japanese and Indian survivors bobbed around some 20 lifeboats, the crew of the Wahoo opened fire with machine guns. “We proceeded to have a field day,” said the captain, Lt Commander Dudley Morton. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/10/GettyImages-181456547-CMYKWeb-Ready-ff88d67.jpg" width="4591" height="3061" alt="A Japanese ship sinks in 1942 after being attacked by USS Wahoo. The American sub would later be involved in one of the most controversial incidents of the war at sea (Image by Getty Images)" title="A Japanese ship sinks in 1942 after being attacked by USS Wahoo. The American sub would later be involved in one of the most controversial incidents of the war at sea (Image by Getty Images)" /> Biological hatred In his defence, Morton claimed that he was returning fire, but this is disputed. Some of his crew were even shocked by his evident “biological hatred” of the enemy. Whatever justification he felt he had, Morton’s attack on the Buyo Maru cost the lives of some 87 Japanese soldiers and more than 195 Indians. His after‑action report included the shooting, but he faced no punishment, and the incident was suppressed by his navy superiors. In postwar narratives, the example of the Buyo Maru was quietly forgotten, while that of the Peleus would be held up as symbolic of Nazi brutality. Read more | Before the atomic bombs, the USA hit Japan with one of the most overlooked (but deadly) campaigns in WW2 This is not a game of moral equivalence. It would be wrong to draw from a few isolated cases the false conclusion that the Allies and Axis were morally indistinguishable. The broader war aims mattered. However ‘clean’ the U-boat campaign may have been, it was serving a regime synonymous with evil. Conversely, even when the Allies faltered morally, their cause – resisting tyranny – remained just. The point, rather, is to challenge the lazy assumption that German U-boat crews were sadistic murderers. The Peleus atrocity was very real, but it was an outlier. U-boats dealt devastating blows to Allied shipping and caused enormous loss of life, but there was only one confirmed instance of the deliberate killing of survivors. The murder of the Peleus survivors was not a feature of the U-boat war. It was a chilling, singular exception. Britain's near-death experience How U-boats drove a nation to the brink of economic strangulation During the early years of the Second World War, Britain came perilously close to defeat in the Battle of the Atlantic – a prolonged struggle against German U-boats aiming to sever the maritime lifelines sustaining Britain. As an island nation dependent on imports for food, fuel and war materiel, Britain faced an existential threat from the Kriegsmarine’s submarine campaign. Between 1939 and 1945, German U-boats sank more than 2,700 Allied merchant ships, totalling approximately 14.5 million gross tons. The most dangerous period came in 1942, when 1,160 ships were lost to U-boats– more than 6.2 million tons – much of it along the poorly defended US coast during Operation Drumbeat. Britain’s shipping losses outpaced production for much of 1941–42, and food rationing became more severe. At one point, Britain had only six weeks’ worth of grain reserves. Winston Churchill later wrote that the U-boat threat was the only thing that truly frightened him during the war. The crisis peaked in early 1943, when monthly merchant shipping losses reached around 700,000 tons. German Admiral Karl Dönitz believed victory was within reach, committing more than 100 U-boats to mid-Atlantic ‘wolfpack’ operations.However, from May 1943 – dubbed ‘Black May’ by the Germans – the tide turned. Allied advances in radar, sonar, Ultra intelligence, long-range patrol aircraft and escort carriers decimated U-boat fleets. That month alone, the Germans lost 41 U-boats, forcing a temporary withdrawal from the Atlantic. Though never completely severed, Britain’s shipping routes were strained to their limits. Without technological breakthroughs, convoy reforms and American shipbuilding – producing Liberty ships faster than U-boats could sink them – Britain might have been economically strangled into submission. In the end, the U-boat campaign claimed the lives of more than 30,000 Allied seamen. But it failed to deliver a knockout blow. How the Allies turned the tide A timeline of the war against the U-boats 3 September 1939: The British liner SS Athenia is sunk by U-30 just hours after Britain had declared war on Germany, marking the start of the Battle of the Atlantic 14 October 1939: U-47 penetrates Scapa Flow and sinks the battleship Royal Oak, killing 833, shocking the Royal Navy and boosting German morale June 1940: Following France’s fall, Germany gains Atlantic U-boat bases at Lorient, Brest and elsewhere. This dramatically extends U-boat reach into the Atlantic and intensifies Allied shipping losses March–June 1941: U-boats enjoy high success against British shipping, aided by poor Allied convoy tactics and limited air cover, marking their most effective early-war period 12 September 1941: U-156 sinks RMS Laconia carrying civilians and PoWs. After surfacing to help survivors, the U-boat is attacked by US aircraft. This prompts the Germans to introduce the Laconia Order, forbidding the rescue of survivors October 1941: German U-boats operate in coordinated ‘wolfpacks’ to attack convoys, reaching peak effectiveness in the mid-Atlantic and causing severe shipping losses, despite increased Allied defences December 1941: Following Pearl Harbor, U-boats begin Operation Drumbeat, targeting unprepared US coastal shipping. This results in catastrophic losses early in 1942 May 1943: In what the Germans will dub ‘Black May’, the Allies turn the tide with improved radar, codebreaking and air cover. U-boat losses spike dramatically, forcing Germany to temporarily withdraw many boats from the Atlantic June 1944: U-boats fail to disrupt Allied landings in Normandy. With air superiority, improved technology and better escorts, the Allies dominate the Atlantic, further reducing U-boat effectiveness 5 May 1945: Admiral Dönitz orders all remaining U-boats to surrender. More than 150 comply, marking the official end of the U-boat war and the wider naval conflict in Europe This article was first published in the November 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Timeline: the rise and fall of the Third Reich
Historian Roger Moorhouse charts the rise and fall of Nazi Germany, from the end of the First World War to the Third Reich's collapse in 1945
1918-1919: The end of the First World War and the birth of the Weimar Republic 9 November 1918: The German monarchy collapses as Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicates and a new republic is established under the leadership of Friedrich Ebert, leader of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). 11 November 1918: Germany signs an armistice, effectively ending World War I. January 1919: The constitution of the new German republic is drafted, establishing a democratic parliamentary system, under a presidency. However, the new republic faces immediate challenges from extremist movements on both the left and right-wings, and due to unrest in Berlin, the constituent assembly for the new republic was held in the city of Weimar – thereby giving it its name. HistoryExtra Academy | Nazi Germany This six-part video course covers everything you need to know about Nazi Germany, guided by historian, author and broadcaster Laurence Rees Find out more 1919-1923: The Weimar Republic and economic instability January 1919: The German Workers' Party (DAP), is established in Munich by railway worker Anton Drexler. It would be the precursor to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), later known as the Nazi Party. June 1919: The Treaty of Versailles is signed, officially ending the war. It imposes harsh terms on Germany, including reparations, territorial losses and a controversial “war guilt” clause, fostering widespread resentment among the German populace. September 1919: Adolf Hitler joins the DAP after attending a party meeting. February 1920: Under Hitler’s growing influence, the NSDAP presents its manifesto – the “25-Point Program” - which includes demands for the abolition of the Treaty of Versailles, the expansion of Germany’s territory, and the establishment of an authoritarian regime. July 1921: Hitler assumes leadership of the NSDAP, becoming its most prominent figure. Autumn 1923: Hyperinflation, resulting from the printing of money to finance the war, begins to seriously undermine the German economy, leading to widespread poverty and social unrest. The Weimar Republic struggles to manage these economic challenges, and extremists on both right and left, including the Nazi Party, gain increasing political traction. 8-9 November, 1923: The Beer Hall Putsch, led by Hitler and other Nazi leaders, attempts to overthrow the Weimar government. The coup fails, twenty people are killed, and Hitler is arrested and arraigned for high treason. 1924-1929: The rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party February/March 1924: Hitler's trial takes place in Munich. He seizes the moment and uses it as an opportunity to spread his message. As a result, he emerges for the first time as a national political figure. He was sentenced to five years imprisonment. 1924: While in prison, in Landsberg, Hitler writes Mein Kampf, in which he outlines his ideological views, including the need for German expansion (Lebensraum) and the superiority of the Aryan race. December 1924: Thanks to a sympathetic prison administration, Hitler is released from prison after less than 9 months. With that, the Nazi Party begins to rebuild its political influence. 1925: Thanks to economic restructuring and political stabilisation, the Weimar Republic begins to flourish. The extremist parties lose their support. 1927: The ban on Hitler making public speeches, which had been in place in most of the country since 1925, is finally lifted. May 1928: In Reichstag (German parliament) elections, the Nazi Party gains only 2.6% of the national vote, confirming Hitler’s position of obscurity on the fringes of German political life. October 1929: The Wall Street Crash triggers the Great Depression, which devastates the global economy, pulling the plug on Germany’s fragile economic recovery. Unemployment rises sharply, leading to widespread discontent with the Weimar Republic and a resurgence of political unrest from both extremes. 1930-1933: The Nazis gain power 1930: The Nazi Party, under Hitler’s leadership, begins to gain significant support, particularly among the working class and rural populations disillusioned with the Weimar Republic’s inability to address the economic crisis. March/April 1932: Hitler runs for president but loses to Paul von Hindenburg, the incumbent. July 1932: The Nazis become the largest party in the Reichstag, with more than 37% of the vote, but they fail to win an outright majority. Autumn 1932: A series of minority governments find themselves unable to govern effectively given the ongoing economic crisis and the political chaos in the Reichstag. January 30, 1933: Hitler is appointed Chancellor of Germany by President Hindenburg, after political manoeuvring and backroom deals among conservative elites, who believe they can control him. 1933-1938: Establishing the totalitarian state 27 February 1933: The Reichstag Fire occurs, and the Nazis use it as a pretext to pass the Reichstag Fire Decree, which suspends civil liberties and allows for the arrest of political opponents. March 23, 1933: The Enabling Act is passed, granting Hitler dictatorial powers. The act allows Hitler to legislate without the Reichstag’s approval, effectively ending democracy in Germany and establishing a one-party state. March 1933: Nazi Germany’s first concentration camp for political opponents is opened, at Dachau, near Munich. The camp, alongside others, is used by the Nazis to consolidate their power by eliminating political rivals, including Communists and Socialists. June 30, 1934: The Night of the Long Knives – a violent purge of the Nazi SA (Sturmabteilung) at the hands of the SS (Schutzstaffel) – further consolidates Hitler’s power and allows him to eliminate all those he considered oppositional. The death toll is estimated at around 150. January 13, 1935: A referendum on the status of the Saarland returns a vote of more than 90% for the province returning to German rule, after 15 years of League of Nations administration. It is another proof of Hitler’s growing popularity. September 15, 1935: The Nuremberg Laws are enacted, stripping Jews of their German citizenship and forbidding mixed marriages. Racial discrimination is enshrined in German law. 7 March 1936: Hitler remilitarizes the Rhineland, violating the Treaty of Versailles, but faces no military response from France or Britain. This bold move boosts his popularity and strengthens his hold on power. August 1936: The Olympic Games are held in Berlin further cementing Hitler’s domestic popularity and enhancing his international prestige. 12 March 1938: The Anschluss, or annexation of Austria, occurs after German forces march, unopposed, into the country. The annexation is confirmed the following month, in a spurious referendum. 30 September 1938: Hitler’s sabre-rattling forces the Munich Agreement, which forces Czechoslovakia to cede the Sudetenland region to Nazi Germany, under the guise of protecting ethnic Germans from persecution. 9-10 November 1938: Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass) occurs, in which Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues across Germany are violently attacked. Thousands of Jews are arrested, beaten and consigned to the concentration camps, marking a significant escalation of anti-Semitic persecution. 1939: The outbreak of the Second World War 23 August 1939: The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is signed between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, effectively dividing eastern Europe between the two and ensuring that Germany will not face a two-front war when it invades Poland. 1 September 1939: Germany invades Poland. 3 September 1939: After their ultimatums demanding that Germany halt its invasion of Poland go unanswered, Britain and France declare war on Germany. 1940-1941: The expansion of Nazi Germany April-June 1940: Nazi Germany swiftly conquers Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. The Blitzkrieg tactics—fast-moving mechanized warfare—prove highly effective. 22 June 1941: Operation Barbarossa begins, when Germany invades the Soviet Union. Initially hugely successful, the invasion stalls as the harsh winter sets in and Soviet resistance grows. Autumn 1941: The Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing squads, begin mass executions of Jews and other “undesirable” elements across occupied Eastern Europe. As many as 1.5 million Jews would be killed in this way. 1942-1944: The turning of the tide October-November 1942: The Battle of El Alamein halts the German advance in the Western Desert. 8 November 1942: In Operation Torch, British and American forces land in Algeria and Morocco, marking the beginning of the end of the German campaign in North Africa. February 1943: The Battle of Stalingrad ends, as the German Sixth Army is surrounded and forced to surrender to the Soviets, marking a major turning point in the war in favour of the Allies. May 1943: After mounting losses in the fighting the convoys in the Atlantic, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, commander of Germany’s U-boat fleet, withdraws his wolfpacks from the theatre, pending technological updates and reinforcements. He privately confesses that he has lost the Battle of the Atlantic. 9 July 1943: In Operation Husky, the Allies launch a successful invasion of Sicily, further weakening Germany’s military position and leading, later than month, to the fall of Hitler’s ally, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. 24 July 1943: The Allied bombing of Hamburg – Operation Gomorrah – begins. The heaviest aerial assault of the war to date, it will culminate in some 37,000 dead and a profound blow to German domestic morale. July-August 1943: The Battle of Kursk deals a crushing blow to German ambition on the Eastern Front. German land forces would never regain the initiative. 6 June 1944: D-Day sees Allied forces land in Normandy, which will begin the liberation of France and Western Europe. 20 July 1944: Operation Valkyrie, an assassination attempt on Hitler, is carried out by German officers, led by Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg. The plot’s failure leads to a harsh internal crackdown on suspected conspirators. 25 August 1944: Allied forces liberate Paris 1945: The fall of the Third Reich January 1945: The failure of the German Ardennes Offensive – the “Battle of the Bulge” – exhausts what remains of German reserves. 13-15 February 1945: The bombing of Dresden results in around 25,000 dead. 19 April 1945: Soviet victory in the Battle of the Seelow Heights, east of Berlin, opens the way to the German capital. 24 April 1945: Soviet forces complete the encirclement of Berlin. 25 April 1945: Advancing American and Soviet forces meet at Torgau on the Elbe, effectively cutting what remained of Hitler’s Germany in half. 30 April 1945: Hitler commits suicide in his bunker in Berlin as Soviet forces close in on the centre of the city. 2 May 1945: Berlin surrenders to the Soviets. 7-8 May 1945: Germany officially surrenders to the Allies – at Reims, on 7 May, and at Karlshorst, Berlin, the following day – thus marking the end of the war in Europe. 1945-1946: The Nuremberg Trials 20 November 1945: The Nuremberg Trials open, to prosecute key Nazi leaders for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against peace. 16 October 1946: Ten of the twelve high-ranking Nazis that were sentenced to death at Nuremberg are executed.. The two exceptions are Martin Bormann – who was sentenced in absentia (and was already dead) – and Hermann Göring, who committed suicide in his cell the night before.
Why Schindler’s List remains relevant decades on
Roger Moorhouse reflects on the lasting legacy of perhaps the most famous movie about the Holocaust ever filmed, Schindler’s List…
Schindler’s List chronicles the true story of Oskar Schindler, a German businessman, who helped to save the lives of more than a thousand Jews during the Holocaust. Directed by Steven Spielberg and released in 1993, it addresses one of the darkest chapters of human history – the systematic extermination of Europe’s Jews by the Nazis – through the story of Schindler, a man who starts out as a profit-driven opportunist but evolves through the film into a selfless saviour. Shot in black and white, it presents a gripping picture of moral courage in the face of unspeakable horror, and stands as one of the most powerful historical films ever made. Is Schindler's List a true story? Schindler's List is based on a true story. Though, as with most historical movies, some creative liberties were taken for narrative clarity. The film is adapted from Thomas Keneally's 1982 historical novel Schindler's Ark, which tells the story of Oskar Schindler’s efforts to protect Jews during the Holocaust. Schindler, a member of the Nazi party, initially arrived in Kraków in 1939, driven by the prospect of financial gain in the ‘wild east’ of German-occupied Poland. However, as the horrors of the Holocaust unfolded around him, his perspective changed, and he began to use his enamel factory as a refuge for Jewish workers. He would ultimately save some 1,200 lives. How historically accurate is Schindler's List? While Schindler's List is widely regarded as a historically sound portrayal of the Holocaust – its events anchored in archival documentation and in the testimonies of those that Schindler saved – there are nuances to consider regarding its accuracy. For instance, that some minor characters and scenes were added or altered for dramatic purposes. A good example of this is the character of Itzhak Stern, played by Ben Kingsley, who is a composite of several people who helped Schindler to run his factory. The film also takes a few creative liberties to maximise its emotional impact, and the transformation of Schindler himself is a good case in point. Many take issue with the apparent beatification of Schindler, pointing out that – for all his later heroics – he arrived in Kraków as an agent of the German state, as a Nazi Party member, and as someone bent on exploiting the German occupation of Poland for his own ends. Though this fact is not exactly glossed over in the film, Schindler’s moral conversion is certainly subjected to some artistic licence. The telling scene in this regard is when Schindler and his mistress witness the liquidation of the Kraków ghetto while out riding. It is, of course, a hugely powerful and emotive moment, but not based on historical fact. We don’t know when Schindler’s moral conversion occurred, and whether he witnessed the liquidation in this way at all. Read more | 7 must-see WW2 films, from Schindler’s List to Letters from Iwo Jima Nonetheless, aside from such artistic flourishes, the film should be commended for its commitment to portraying the horrific reality of the Holocaust with unflinching authenticity. For instance, the depiction of the liquidation of the Kraków ghetto (with the exception of Schindler witnessing it) is perhaps as close to historical fact as it is possible to get in a Hollywood film, along with the execution of Jews in mass shootings, or the horrifying conditions shown in the nearby concentration camp at Płaszów. Spielberg himself deserves much of the credit for this. He used real locations in Poland, and many of the survivors from Schindler’s factory were consulted during the film’s production. His meticulous attention to detail, combined with his empathy for the survivors and victims, ensured that Schindler’s List would remain one of the most historically accurate depictions of the Holocaust in cinematic history. More from us HistoryExtra members can explore more Second World War history with exclusive content from our archives How the holocaust began Aftermath of the Holocaust: how Europe dealt with the crimes of the Third Reich The myth of the innocent bystander: conformity and complicity in Nazi Germany Experiments in evil: the shocking efforts to understand the atrocities of the Holocaust Not a HistoryExtra member? Explore our latest membership offers The cultural relevance of Schindler’s List Even 30 years after its release, Schindler’s List still holds the public’s imagination because it presents the Holocaust not just as an abstract historical event, but as a deeply personal story about one man’s moral awakening in the face of absolute evil. It forces us to confront the complexities of human nature and our capacity for both cruelty and kindness. It demands of us the discomforting question: ‘what would I have done?’ The most important philosophical theme in Schindler's List is the exploration of moral choice in a world consumed by immorality. The film shows that even in the face of totalitarianism and institutionalised violence, the actions of the individual can still make a difference. Schindler’s transformation from a selfish businessman to a man of compassion is a powerful narrative that speaks to the universal human struggle between good and evil, and shows the impact that our individual choices can have on the lives of others. One of the most memorable motifs in Schindler’s List is the ‘girl in red,’ a young Jewish child who appears briefly in the film amidst the chaos of the Kraków ghetto liquidation, and then later in a scene depicting the burning of the dead. In striking contrast to the otherwise black-and-white film, she is shown in a red coat, giving her presence enormous emotional weight. The use of colour for the girl is a powerful visual metaphor for the human cost of the Holocaust, emphasising the fate of the individual amongst collective tragedy. How Schindler’s List has shaped our understanding of the Holocaust It is rare for a historical novel or film to penetrate our collective consciousness, but Schindler’s List has had a significant impact on how the Holocaust is understood by the public. One might legitimately question whether Schindler’s List is the most complete and accurate representation of the Holocaust on screen, especially given its tight focus on events in Kraków. But, given its remarkable success, Schindler’s List has certainly played a significant role in bringing the story of the Holocaust to a much wider audience than any history book could manage, and offering an accessible yet deeply emotional account of events that may otherwise seem distant. Our historical understanding of the Holocaust continues to evolve, of course, as historians offer new analyses and more testimonies from survivors become available. However, the role of cinema is hugely significant in cementing the wider, popular understanding of the Holocaust, especially as the events themselves retreat beyond human memory. Schindler’s List is that rare thing: a film that transcends the genre of cinema. It is a timeless and essential work of art. For more content like this, check out the best historical movies of all time as chosen by historians and ranked by you, history TV and film to stream tonight, and our picks of the new history TV and radio released in the UK this wee WW2 | The Big Questions Member exclusive | Historian and broadcaster Laurence Rees explains major moments of the global conflict in this five-part series. Listen to all episodes now
The real tattooists of Auschwitz: who were the men who turned people into numbers?
A love story between two prisoners at the worst of the Nazis’ concentration camps? The plot of the Tattooist of Auschwitz might be considered unduly light given its setting but, as Roger Moorhouse explores, the job of inking those dreaded identification numbers on prisoners’ arms was indeed a real one
Auschwitz: the largest of the concentration camps in the Second World War, where more than a million were put to death in the Holocaust. That is the setting for a six-part period drama streaming on Sky Atlantic in the UK from 2 May, based on the 2018 novel The Tattooist of Auschwitz, by Heather Morris. Lale Sokolov (played by Jonah Hauer-King), a Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942, is made to tattoo new arrivals to the camp with a registration number on their arms. When he meets a young prisoner named Gita (Anna Próchniak), he falls in love and so is offered a slither of hope in this otherwise hopeless place. Here, Roger Moorhouse, an expert in modern German and Central European history, explains that not only was tattooing exclusive to Auschwitz, but that the drama series’ protagonist – Lale Sokolov – was a real person. Was there really a tattooist at Auschwitz? There were a few, in fact. From the middle of the Second World War, it was standard procedure in Auschwitz to identify those arriving prisoners who had been selected for work by tattooing them with their camp registration number. The logic was that the corpses of dead prisoners, which were sometimes stripped of their clothing, had to be identifiable to ensure that camp records could be satisfactorily maintained. WW2 | The Big Questions Member exclusive | Historian and broadcaster Laurence Rees explains major moments of the global conflict in this five-part series. Listen to all episodes now Was everyone at Auschwitz tattooed? Initially, the SS had only tattooed Soviet prisoners of war, and those who were in the infirmary or scheduled to be executed. The expansion of Auschwitz in 1942, however, saw the practice extended to include all prisoners that were selected to work. Those that were exterminated upon arrival were not registered, so there was no need for them to be tattooed. In the early phase, prisoners were tattooed on the left side of the chest using a form of metal stamp that could be changed to make different numbers. This would then be punched at one blow into the prisoner’s skin, before ink was rubbed over the resulting wound to create a crude tattoo. This method was considered impractical when the numbers of people being registered increased. Instead, a single-needle device was introduced, with which the serial number could be tattooed onto the outside of the left forearm. This process did not take place at the other concentration camps, only at Auschwitz. It was primarily Jews that were marked, although other prisoners, such as Roma and some Poles, were processed in the same way. In all, some 400,000 registration numbers were issued. Who were the tattooists of Auschwitz? Not much is known about the tattooists themselves, except that they were part of a small group of prisoners working directly for the SS in the registration office and could be called on at any time to perform their task. Granted extra rations and bonus payments, they were thereby preserved from some of the worst horrors of the camp. Was Lale Sokolov a real person? Lale Sokolov (formerly Ludwig Eisenberg), the character at the heart of Heather Morris’s novel was one of the tattooists at Auschwitz. Though the book has received criticism by historians for its rather cavalier treatment of its wider subject matter, Sokolov was a real prisoner at the camp. Upon arriving in 1942, he was duly tattooed with the number 32407. Later, in 1943, after a bout of typhus, Sokolov was engaged by the SS as a tattooist, in which capacity he is thought to have seen out the remainder of his time at Auschwitz. Camp records show him working for the registration department at least up to the end of September 1944. As the end of the war approached, and with the Red Army advancing, he was evacuated in January 1945 and taken to Mauthausen, but he managed to escape. Sokolov survived the war and later emigrated to Australia, where he would be interviewed by Morris. This meeting is part of the new television drama, with the older Sokolov depicted by Harvey Keitel. Only in his last years before his death in 2006 did he feel able to talk about his experiences at Auschwitz. More from us HistoryExtra members can explore this topic further with exclusive content from our archives How the holocaust began The liberation of Auschwitz: what happened and how do we remember the Holocaust? Aftermath of the Holocaust: how Europe dealt with the crimes of the Third Reich The complex history of concentration camps Not a HistoryExtra member? Explore our latest membership offers
Roger Moorhouse on the historical echoes of the war in Ukraine
Historian Roger Moorhouse writes on the ways in which recent developments in the Russia-Ukraine conflict echo the Second World War
It was “an army of beggars”, one eyewitness wrote – a mass of soldiers seemingly as interested in plunder as in fighting. Another spoke of their outdated equipment, shabby uniforms and dilapidated vehicles, as likely to break down as to be destroyed in combat. This description might adequately apply to Ukrainian reports of the Russian invasion of 2022. In fact, it is a portmanteau of reactions to the Soviet invasion of Poland more than eight decades ago, in September 1939. Every conflict, of course, calls up its own historical echoes, associated with the events themselves or the locations being fought over. In that respect, the war in Ukraine is no exception. Indeed, given that the Kremlin’s methods of subverting its neighbours appear largely unchanged from Soviet times – including false-flag operations, deportations, disinformation and so-called referendums – it would be hard for the historian’s antennae not to be twitching while watching the news from Ukraine. Read more | Russia-Ukraine crisis: 9 milestone moments in history that explain today’s invasion The current Ukrainian counteroffensive in the northern Donbas, east of Kharkiv, is a good case in point. Kharkiv itself is redolent with brutal history from the 20th century. The city was fought over extensively during the Second World War, changing hands between German and Soviet forces four times between 1941 and 1943. The end result was that a city that once boasted a population of more than a million was reduced to a moonscape of refugees and ruins. There are other similarities to current events. The second of those battles for Kharkiv, in May 1942, was largely fought along the line of the River Oskol around Kupyansk and Izyum – a line also reached by Ukrainian forces in September 2022. That earlier battle – a German victory – resulted in nearly 300,000 Soviet casualties. Russian and Ukrainian forces are today fighting atop their ancestors’ bones. Yet Kharkiv has another, even darker resonance. Its central prison, run by the Soviet People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (or NKVD), was one of the three main execution sites used in the 1940 Katyń Massacre in which some 22,000 captured Polish officers and policemen were murdered in cold blood by their Soviet captors. Starobilsk, site of the camp in which the prisoners killed in Kharkiv were held, is currently being contested between Russian and Ukrainian forces. Few in the west will recognise its significance, when – or if – its name flits across our television screens. Failing morale In a broader sense, the recent collapse of the Russian frontline is symbolic of a longer-term corrosion of Russian forces through institutionalised corruption and technological backwardness. It might be argued, of course, that corruption and backwardness are nothing new to Russian military culture, and that they can be adequately counterbalanced by coercion and propaganda. To some extent that is correct but, crucially, failing morale among Russian troops, coupled with the collapse of the Kremlin’s propaganda rationale for the invasion – and the expectation that Russian forces would be welcomed in Ukraine – has compounded those deeper ills. Many Russian soldiers, it seems, are no longer sure what they are fighting for. History has countless examples of how damaging a lack of faith in the cause can be. On the podcast | Keith Lowe talks to Matt Elton about how today’s conflict between Russia and Ukraine can be traced back to the Second World War That failing morale has hardly been helped, of course, by the evident crisis in supply in the Russian army. Russian and Soviet armies have rarely shown much concern for the welfare of their troops. Some Red Army soldiers invading Poland in 1939 did so lacking boots or even rifles – testament to a mentality that viewed the “ordinary” soldier as thoroughly expendable: a tool to be used and then discarded, replaced by another unfortunate. The invasion of Ukraine shows us that little has changed in this regard. Ill-trained and ill-supplied, with long-range missiles hampering their support infrastructure and arms and fuel dumps, Russian soldiers in the field appear to find themselves more than usually abandoned to their fate. Images of the new wave of Russian reservists, often supplied with antiquated Soviet-era equipment, will do little to assuage their concerns. Read more | The brutal blitzkrieg: the 1939 invasion of Poland Disturbing parallels All of which suggests an army in a degree of disarray, as the partial Russian collapse in recent months might confirm. If we are being optimistic, we might suggest that it is reminiscent – albeit on a much smaller scale – of Operation Bagration, the Soviet summer offensive of 1944 that effectively destroyed German Army Group Centre and opened the very real probability of a German defeat. It is a common maxim that history repeats itself. It doesn’t, of course, but it sometimes creates echoes. Some are coincidences with no real significance. Sometimes, however, those echoes can reveal a deeper truth. In the case of this war, both categories are present. Superficial coincidences abound, thrown up by accidents of geography or the simple fact that the return of armoured warfare to the European continent was always bound to call forth comparisons to the last time such horrors were seen. Yet some of the echoes created by the Russian invasion of Ukraine are not accidental or superficial but instead betray the deeper truth of the Kremlin’s method of war. For those with an understanding of the history, those echoes are plainly evident in the arrogant rhetoric about “the Russian world” that opened the invasion, so redolent of the spurious “spheres of influence” that accompanied the war in 1939. They are evident in the Kremlin’s mealy-mouthed mendacity in describing the war as a “special military operation”, just as the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland was officially not an invasion, the word “war” being forbidden. They are evident in the so-called referendums – another tactic from 1940 – called to supposedly legitimatise Russia’s conquests, the results having long since been pre-ordained. Read more | 1945: The race for Berlin They are evident in the forced deportations of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian civilians to the Russian interior, a crime strangely under-reported in the western media yet instantly recognisable to the countless Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians whose forebears suffered the same grim fate in 1940 and after. And they are evident in the atrocities committed by Russian forces against civilian populations: the epidemic of rape grimly reminiscent of the Red Army’s brutal conquest of Berlin in 1945, the casual looting of everyday objects, and the victims of torture, bodies tossed into mass graves with genocidal contempt. The echoes, then, can be overwhelming, but they shouldn’t deafen us to the real significance of what is happening today. The war in Ukraine is not a re-enactment or a greatest-hits medley. It is, instead, to a large extent a battle for the future of Europe itself. In that, Ukraine is attempting to write a new chapter in its own history, looking forward not back. And, though we are wise to be cognisant of the history, we would do well to recognise the significance of that fact. Roger Moorhouse is an author and historian whose books include First to Fight: The Polish War 1939 (Bodley Head, 2019)
Oskar Schindler: your guide to his life and legacy
Historian Roger Moorhouse explores the life of Oskar Schindler, a businessman who rescued more than 1,000 Jews during the Second World War
Disclaimer: please note that this article is from a podcast transcript, which has been lightly edited for clarity By any measure, Oskar Schindler was a remarkable and complex man. His saving of some 1,100 Jews during the Holocaust, places him in rarefied company, and has seen him rightly lauded as a hero, and to those whom he helped save as something like a God. Yet his action is all the more remarkable when one considers his background. Unscrupulous and opportunistic, Schindler was a playboy and adulterer, and a member of the Nazi Party. In fact, his career bore all the hallmarks of a low-level Nazi functionary: he had served German military intelligence in the run-up to the outbreak of war in 1939, and thereafter he had enriched himself considerably at the expense of Jewish-owned industries in Kraków, in occupied Poland. And yet, rather than continue along that unedifying path, Schindler reconsidered, and then – at considerable risk and cost to himself – worked tirelessly to save Jews from extermination in the deathly machinery of the Holocaust. It is this duality that makes Schindler’s story so fascinating and perhaps relatable. He was no pure soul, no pious, saintly figure. He was thoroughly flawed – a rogue and a scoundrel – and yet he found the moral strength to do what he did. Who was Oskar Schindler? Oskar Schindler was born in 1908 in Zwittau, a small town in northern Moravia, in Austria-Hungary. His was a regular, middle-class upbringing, nominally Catholic, with a devoted mother and a rather rogueish father. The young Oskar was bright, certainly, but no bookish scholar; indeed given that he forged a school report as a youth, it appears he might have inherited more than a little of his father’s rather rakish nature. In 1918, when Schindler was still young, his world would have been rocked by the collapse of Austria-Hungary at the end of the First World War. The Schindler family found themselves citizens – and members of a German minority, known as Sudeten Germans – in the newly established Czechoslovak state. Schindler was not initially troubled by such events. He was a keen motorcycle racer – owning a Moto Guzzi, which was rare in pre-war Czechoslovakia – and in 1927 he met Emelie Pelzl, whom he married the following year. Schindler's early life As a young man, Schindler went through a number of jobs, and spent time in the Czechoslovak army. However throughout the 1930s, Schindler had constant money troubles and struggled to hold down a job for any length of time. He liked a drink and was arrested twice in this period for drunken misdemeanours. He also had a number of affairs and fathered two children by one of his mistresses in the early 1930s. He confessed to his wife that he was “by nature, a sybarite”: a lover of pleasure. Read more | Nazi wives: the women beside Hess, Goebbels, Göring and Himmler Schindler had shown little interest in politics up until this point, but the heightened tensions of the 1930s – with the Depression hitting Czechoslovakia hard and with a dynamic and aggressive Germany just across the border – began to change that. He started to identify more strongly as a Sudeten German, and joined the separatist Sudeten German Party in 1935. The following year, he started working as an informant – a paid informant, significantly – of German military intelligence, the Abwehr, giving low-level information on Czech troop movements and so on. This would develop into one of the most significant influences and relationships of his life. In the years that followed, it has been suggested that Schindler became a primary agent of German intelligence services. Some believe he was closely involved in the German clandestine operations that began the war in September 1939 – the Gleiwitz Incident and the attack on the Jablunka Pass (the suggestion is sometimes made, for instance, that Schindler procured the Polish army uniforms that the Germans used for their border provocations against the Poles that summer). This is possible, but his involvement is nonetheless disputed, and may simply be an exaggeration of comparatively low-level espionage activity. It is notable, for instance, that the Gestapo considered Schindler to be merely a “confidante” of the Abwehr at this time, rather than an agent. Whatever Schindler’s precise role in September 1939, he would find a wealth of opportunities in German-occupied Poland in the months that followed, and he would benefit hugely from that connection to the Abwehr. German policy in occupied Poland in those early months of the war centred on two main objectives: firstly, eliminating any sources of possible resistance, and secondly, marginalising and disenfranchising Polish Jews. In that second process, an important component was the forced confiscation of Jewish-owned businesses – many of which were then placed under German control to continue trading. Finding himself in the southern city of Kraków in October 1939, Schindler was soon looking for opportunities by which he could resurrect his former business career – and that confiscation process suited him perfectly. Read more | The brutal blitzkrieg: the 1939 invasion of Poland By the middle of 1940, Oskar Schindler had exploited his Abwehr contacts and good reputation sufficiently well that he was the owner of three businesses in Kraków – a glassware factory and two enamel factories; one of which was the bankrupt “Rekord” factory on Lipowa street, which Schindler would resurrect and rename as the Deutsche Emailwarenfabrik – the German Enamelwares Factory. He would benefit from a slew of orders from the German military; for mess tins, cartridge cases and, later, fuses. Initially, the majority of Schindler’s employees across his three factories were non-Jewish Poles. However, given that – according to the new German regulations – Jews could be employed for a fraction of the cost of non-Jews, the proportion of Jewish employees increased rapidly. At this point, of course, Schindler was employing Jews not out of altruism, but because doing so was cost effective. Although at this stage there had been numerous abuses and atrocities, the Holocaust was yet to begin, so for Schindler the business benefits easily outweighed any growing humanitarian concerns. This, however, would change. Why did Schindler change his mind? One waypoint in that shift in Schindler’s thinking was the brutal deportation from the Kraków ghetto, which was carried out in May and June of 1942. The ghetto had been established in 1941, when all remaining Jews in Kraków were ordered to the run-down, industrial suburb of Podgórze, south of the river Vistula. That October, the ghetto was sealed, and the order was given that any Jews found beyond the walls without official permission, and any Poles caught assisting them, would be sentenced to death. The 20,000 or so Jews that lived in the ghetto were housed in cramped, unsanitary conditions, and forced to work for German businesses within and beyond the ghetto walls. One of the latter, of course, being Schindler’s enamel factory in the nearby suburb of Zabłocie. The shift from an exploitative policy towards the Jews to an exterminatory one took place over the winter of 1941–42, and was expressed by the Nazis – privately at least – at the Wannsee conference, in Berlin, in January 1942, where the possible mechanics of the Holocaust were put on record for the first time. Though the policy was still to evolve fully, the result would be the systematic, wholesale extermination of Europe’s Jews in purpose-built killing centres, such as Treblinka, Bełźec and Auschwitz-Birkenau. This process accelerated in the spring and summer of 1942, and was necessarily preceded by the clearing, or partial clearing, of many of the ghettos of occupied Poland. Read more | Laurence Rees on the perpetrators of the Holocaust The Kraków ghetto was subjected to a large-scale deportation in June 1942, when some 11,000 Jews – those that the Germans tended to call “useless mouths”, as they were the elderly, the unwell and those otherwise unable to work – were deported to their deaths at Bełzec. It was around this time that Schindler’s attitude towards the Jews who worked for him began to shift. In truth, he had never shared the virulent anti-Semitism of many of his fellows; it is said that he had had Jewish friends as a youth, and – of course – living in the Sudetenland in the 1930s, he had avoided much of the blood-thirsty anti-Semitic propaganda that was then common across the border. There were other reasons for the shift, however. For one thing, Schindler had already fallen foul of the Gestapo by the summer of 1942, having been arrested and accused of “fraternising” with Jews after kissing some female members of his workforce during a birthday celebration. To some extent, it may be that he saw protecting “his” Jews as an act of resistance against the petty, racist interventions of the Gestapo. But, more than anything else, perhaps, the shift was motivated by simple humanitarian concerns: his knowledge that ordinary people were being deported to their deaths. As he would later say in an interview, he helped his Jewish workers because “what the Germans were doing to them was wrong.” Whatever the precise reasoning, already in 1942, he was willing to compromise himself to help his Jewish employees: during the June 1942 deportation, for instance, he personally intervened to retrieve 14 of his workers who had already been loaded onto a deportation train. He assuaged the objections of his German superiors using charm and bribery. And this was how Schindler would proceed; he would be arrested by the Gestapo twice more, and would spend vast sums of his own money in bribes – including BMW cars and over $200,000 – to secure his release and to be able to keep, and feed, his workforce. By early 1943, Schindler’s primary relationship was no longer with the Kraków Gestapo, and was instead with the SS Untersturmführer Amon Göth. Göth – so memorably played in the 1993 film Schindler’s List by Ralph Fiennes – was an Austrian, of solid, middle-class background, who had been enthused by Nazism and had joined the Nazi party in 1931 and the SS by 1932. By 1942, Göth had fallen into the circle of Odilo Globocnik – SS commander in Lublin – and so had become acquainted with the workings of the death camps of Bełźec, Sobibór and Treblinka. Unfazed, he progressed through the ranks, and was appointed commandant of the newly-established labour camp at Płaszów – just to the south of the Kraków ghetto – in February 1943. Read more | The Jews who fought back: the story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising One of Göth’s first tasks was to oversee the liquidation of the Kraków ghetto, in March 1943, an action that was carried out with almost indescribable brutality. In the process, around 2,000 Jews – those able to work – were taken to Płaszów camp, and a further 3,000 were deported to Auschwitz for extermination. Around 2,000 were simply killed out of hand by the Germans in the streets of the ghetto. Unlike in the film, Schindler almost certainly did not witness the murderous violence first hand, although he definitely knew about it and indeed told his workers to remain in his factory for the duration, in an attempt to keep them safe. Göth was no less brutal in his role as commandant of Płaszów, and had a reputation for random killings of workers. Most memorably perhaps, it was said that his choice of headwear indicated his mood. If he was wearing his field cap, the workers were relatively safe; if he put on his officer’s cap, they were rather more wary. If he donned his Tyrolean hat, however, the Płaszów workers knew to keep out of his way. It has been estimated that some 10,000 people were murdered during Göth’s reign at Płaszów. As one survivor of the camp recalled: “When you saw Göth, you saw death.” Despite such horrors, Schindler needed to forge some sort of functioning relationship with Göth if he was to be able to protect his Jewish employees from harm. In doing so, he utilised every tool available to him; his charm and guile, and, of course, his willingness to drink and dine with the commandant – to indulge that sybaritic lifestyle that he so loved (except this time, it was for a higher purpose). In this way, he was able to persuade Göth that the war effort was best served by establishing a small subcamp of Płaszów next to his factory, so that his labourers did not have to travel so far to work. He would also be able to treat and feed his workers well, and protect them from the murderous caprice of Göth and his henchmen. Did Schindler really write a list? In 1944, Schindler compiled his first “list” – a list of those workers that he intended to save from deportation and death at the hands of the Germans. For the following two years of the war, he would lie, bribe and cajole – anything that was necessary to preserve them from harm. Not only charming Göth, but also travelling to Berlin to berate and persuade some higher-ups there. He even travelled on a clandestine mission to Budapest, to meet representatives of a Jewish aid agency, to inform them about the conditions being endured by those Jews remaining in Poland. After 18 months of this perilous balancing act, relief of sorts came in the autumn of 1944, when two events signalled the end of a fragile status quo. Firstly, the impending approach of the Red Army meant that Płaszów camp was ordered to be wound up. That August, while an ever-smaller contingent of prisoners dismantled the camp buildings and disposed of the bodies of the dead, a succession of rail transports departed from the camp, bound for the gas chambers of Auschwitz. A month later, in September, Göth himself was removed from his position in charge of Płaszów, being arrested by the SS on charges of corruption and the violation of concentration camp regulations. Read more | Life in Nazi Germany – everything you wanted to know It would have been easy, perhaps, for Schindler to abandon his workforce at this point; to wind up his factory, as ordered, and leave his workers to their fate, among the thousands of others that would be caught up in the maelstrom of the closing months of the war. But, if that was ever a temptation, he resisted it, and instead petitioned the German authorities to be permitted to move his factory, and its workforce, to the comparative safety of Brünnlitz in Moravia, not far from his hometown, again citing concerns for the war effort as his logic. Permission granted, he was authorised by the SS to take some 1,100 workers with him, and the evacuation began in the middle of October 1944. Even then, Schindler’s worries were not yet at an end. Given the SS regulation that all inmates moving between camps were to spend a time in quarantine, his female inmates found themselves in Auschwitz, while the men were sent to the camp at Gross Rosen in nearby Silesia. In the chaos of those final months of the war, it would have been easy for them all to have been incorporated, unnoticed, into the prisoner ranks of both camps, were it not for Schindler again engaging with the SS authorities on their behalf, offering bribes and diamonds, and an enhanced day rate for his future use of the prisoners, on condition that they were released only to him. The camp at Brunnlitz produced little of value, but it served to preserve the lives of its workers until their liberation at the hands of the Red Army in the spring of 1945, by which time Schindler was fleeing westwards with his wife, arriving in Germany in the autumn. What happened to Oskar Schindler after the war? Schindler’s post-war career essentially mirrored that of his pre-war ventures; business failures and penury seemed to be his constant companions. In 1948 he attempted to claim restitution from Jewish charities for the expenses incurred in helping his Jewish workers survive; he received a meagre $15,000. The following year, he emigrated to Argentina where he tried his hand at chicken farming. But, a decade later, bankruptcy forced him back to Germany again, where not long after, he suffered a heart attack. How did Schindler die? Throughout his post-war tribulations, he was supported by those he had saved – remaining in contact with them, attending celebrations, being supported by their financial donations, and dividing his time between Germany and Israel, where he was lauded as a hero. He died in October 1974, in Hildesheim, Germany, and was buried – according to his wish – in the Catholic cemetery on Mount Zion in Jerusalem, the only former Nazi Party member to be honoured in this way. He was also named Righteous among the Nations in 1993. What is Schindler’s legacy? It seems rather commonplace to say that Oskar Schindler led a remarkable life. Few of us will ever experience anything like what he did, or touch so many lives. His legacy, of course, is the 1,100 or so Jews that he saved from almost certain extermination through his guile, passion and determination. His precise motives were never satisfactorily examined, but we can surmise that he did so primarily out of a profound humanitarian instinct, alloyed with a dislike of the SS and Gestapo, and a fierce independent streak. What is most remarkable is the stark duality of Schindler’s life. He was no saint. He was a womaniser, a dilletante and a bankrupt – a sybarite, by his own admission. His early life and career appeared to mirror almost precisely those of so many countless minor Nazi functionaries in the run-up to the war; the profiteering, the exploitation, the easy amoral rise through the ranks. Moreover, in the years after the war, he reverted to type – to a rather chaotic, hand-to-mouth existence, dogged by business failures, infidelities and bankruptcy. At heart, then, his is a story of a man who was clearly deeply flawed, but had not totally lost his moral compass. He may have been a rake and a scoundrel – and in many ways a failure – but he was wise enough to know that the German extermination of the Jews was fundamentally wrong, and – more than that – it had to be resisted. The final word on this most remarkable story goes to Schindler’s former wife, Emilie, who summed up his life with lapidary simplicity: “he did nothing remarkable before the war, and nothing remarkable after it. He was fortunate therefore that in the short fierce era between 1939 and 1945 he met people who summoned forth his deeper talents.” Roger Moorhouse is a historian and author specialising in modern German and Central European history
Peace for our time: what was written on Neville Chamberlain's piece of paper?
Many will have seen the iconic images of Chamberlain arriving at Heston aerodrome, on 30 September 1938, brandishing his “piece of paper” and proclaiming “peace for our time”. But what was actually written on the paper and does it still exist? Author and historian Roger Moorhouse explains...
The deeper story of Neville Chamberlain's piece of paper is an intriguing one. The piece of paper itself has aroused some speculation over the years. It was not – as some wits suggested at the time – the prime minister’s laundry list, pressed into service as a prop; neither was it a copy of the broader Munich Agreement, by which Czechoslovakia was dismembered by the western Allies to appease Nazi Germany. Read more | Did appeasement cause the Second World War? It was, in fact, a private accord, signed earlier that day in Munich by Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler. Its three short paragraphs stressed the importance of Anglo-German relations, expressed the “desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again” and stated the common resolve to use negotiation in all future disagreements. As such, the accord can be seen as central to Chamberlain’s noble but doomed attempt to exert a moderating influence on Hitler, by fostering a working relationship with him. Unlike most other government documents – which are consigned to the National Archive in Kew – the piece of paper was sent direct to the Imperial War Museum, in January 1940, less than 18 months after being brandished in triumph by its author at Heston. Britain was already at war with Germany by that time, of course, so the accord was very much a dead letter. Read more | Making friends with Hitler: Britain’s pre-war admiration for the Nazi dictator Fittingly, the note, which accompanied it to the museum, stated that while the document “seemed of the highest significance then… its implications are now ironical”. The piece of paper was kept on display at the Imperial War Museum until being replaced by a facsimile copy in the early 1990s. The original – still remarkably well-preserved – is now kept in a temperature-controlled strong room in the museum’s archive.
Rise of a dictator: how did Hitler gain power and become the führer of Germany?
Adolf Hitler was a failed painter on the fringes of local politics, so how did he manage to amass so much influence that he had a dictatorship bestowed on him? Writing for BBC History Revealed, Roger Moorhouse charts how Hitler stage-managed his way to power – transforming from feckless would-be artist into a suave politician
In October 1922, Munich photographer Heinrich Hoffmann received an intriguing telegram. He was used to getting picture commissions, but the request – from an American photographic agency – was remarkable, because it offered the (then) huge fee of $100 for a picture of a little-known Munich politician. That politician’s name was Adolf Hitler. Hitler was a relative newcomer to the Munich political scene. He had first emerged late in 1919, as an impassioned speaker for the nationalist German Workers’ Party (DAP), a small clique of disgruntled right-wing misfits. By the following spring, however, he had effectively engineered a takeover of the party, giving it the direction he felt it had lacked and renaming it the NSDAP – adding ‘National Socialist’ to the title. By 1922, though Hitler’s Nazi Party (as it was known) was making some political progress, it was still largely a Munich phenomenon. Hitler was barely known outside of Bavaria. In such circumstances, Hoffmann’s interest was piqued, and when he began to make enquiries about fulfilling the request, he discovered the reason for the high price. Keen to raise funds for his party, Hitler was severely rationing his own image to that end, creating a mystique around himself and using his bodyguards to prevent unauthorised photographers from taking his picture. It was a canny move. The dark charisma of Adolf Hitler Hitler's millionaire backers: how Germany's elite facilitated the rise of the Nazis Where did Adolf Hitler live? The homes of the führer and how they were used as Nazi propaganda Hitler is often viewed as someone slightly otherworldly; a man so obsessed with his odious political mission that he cared little for the daily business of politics and resolutely aloof from frivolous concerns about his image or his public profile. Yet, as this example clearly demonstrates, that assumption is wholly incorrect. Though Hitler was certainly a political obsessive, that did not imply a lack of concern for what we would now call public relations – the art of the political sell. At a time when few politicians were conscious of such matters, Hitler, conversely, paid great attention to them. How did Hitler build his image? While Hitler was busy building that public profile, his first opportunity to grasp for power presented itself. In November 1923, with the country reeling from runaway hyperinflation, communist risings and a Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr, it appeared for a season that Germany itself would scarcely survive. Hitler sought to exploit the crisis by engineering a coup – the so-called Beer Hall Putsch – in which he and his supporters attempted to seize political power in Munich, as a prelude to a takeover in Berlin. However, when Hitler and his followers met the guns of the Bavarian state police, on the Odeonsplatz in central Munich, the coup attempt collapsed in chaos. Arrested in the aftermath, Hitler was charged with treason and arraigned for trial, and many contemporaries speculated that it was the end of his political career. Hitler, however, had other ideas. Though he briefly contemplated suicide, he resolved to use the platform provided to him by his trial to proselytise for the Nazi cause. Shamelessly playing to the press gallery, and indulged by a sympathetic judge, Hitler was able to exploit the trial as a public relations opportunity, pouring scorn on Germany’s political leaders and gaining a name for himself nationwide. The long shadow of Adolf Hitler Reporting on Hitler: how foreign correspondents in Nazi Germany battled to expose the truth At the close of proceedings, he even goaded the court, ridiculing the insignificance of its deliberations: “It is not you, gentlemen, who pass judgement,” he said. “You may pronounce us guilty a thousand times over, but the goddess of the eternal court of history will smile and tear to tatters the sentence of this court. For she acquits us.” Hitler had been arraigned for trial alongside eight other ‘leaders’ of the coup attempt, yet such was his performance that by the end, he had become the senior partner. Though he was sentenced to five years detention, he had emerged as the leader of the German radical right. How did Hitler gain power? In the years that followed, Germany recovered from the crisis of 1923, and Hitler – though released from imprisonment after only nine months – sank into relative obscurity, subjected as he was to a nationwide public-speaking ban. However, despite his enforced silence, he was far from inactive. He continued speaking to private audiences, and he worked hard to polish both his speaking skills and his public image. In this, the photographer Heinrich Hoffmann would play a crucial role, forging in the process a lasting and lucrative relationship with Hitler – one that history has often overlooked. Throughout the 1920s, Hoffman assisted Hitler in honing his public image, photographing him in a variety of outfits to establish those ‘looks’ that worked to Hitler’s advantage, and those that didn’t. Lederhosen and SA caps were out, sober suits and ties were in. He also helped Hitler finesse the often elaborate gestures that he employed while speaking, photographing his subject in his Munich studio, before meticulously going through the images with Hitler to weed out those gestures and actions that appeared too ridiculous or overblown, and identify those that might be used again. In this capacity, Hitler also engaged a former actor and self-styled mystic, Erik Jan Hanussen, who advised him on his presentation skills. Hanussen told him that, though his delivery was persuasive, he should employ a more expansive use of gesture and body language to enhance the effect that he had with his audience. The results were impressive. As a speaker, Hitler quickly gained a formidable reputation, and his delivery was often described as inspirational, even as a quasi-religious experience. Though he spoke with only cursory notes, he was meticulous in his preparation, paying close attention to what he wore, the lighting and layout of the stage. He would customarily pause for a few moments before speaking, allowing a tense silence to ramp up the expectation. Then he would begin in a rather quiet, even hesitant manner, forcing his audience to listen intently to his words. In due course, he would begin to raise his voice, stressing certain words and syllables, elaborately rolling his ‘r’s, becoming more expressive and impassioned, and employing the gestures that he had so diligently rehearsed with Hanussen and Hoffmann. Roger Moorhouse: How Hitler’s diplomatic miscalculation led to WW2 The woman who gave birth for Hitler Over two hours or so, Hitler would range widely – at times angry, scornful, even darkly funny – expertly channelling the hopes, fears and prejudices of his audience. By the end, he would be physically exhausted, bathed in sweat and emotionally drained. His audience, more often than not, were spellbound. In private, too, Hitler developed a persona. He could often be socially awkward. He found ordinary conversation difficult and had a predisposition to rant and preach. And, as his secretary Christa Schroeder recalled, he had the habit of holding eye-contact when meeting someone for the first time, as if to mesmerise them, or peer into their soul. Much of this, too, was part of the act – fostering a sense that he was a man apart, not like other politicians, not entirely of this world. The result, by around 1930, was a carefully constructed public profile. From the zealous fervour of his speeches to his simple dress sense and social awkwardness, Hitler was selling a novel vision to his followers and to the wider German public, offering national redemption, a ‘new Germany’, a ‘new man’, a ‘new Jerusalem’. That religious analogy is not misplaced. There was much in the ceremony of Nazism – and in the central role of Hitler himself – that strongly echoed religious ritual. The Nazi movement had its 'martyrs' – those killed in the Beer Hall Putsch. It had its 'relics', most important among them the 'Blood Flag', a swastika soaked in the blood of those same martyrs from 1923. It also had a 'bible' in the shape of Hitler's Mein Kampf – a rambling, pretentious autobiography-cum-manifesto, which he wrote while imprisoned for treason in 1924. At the centre of it all, of course, was Hitler himself – a lapsed Catholic who understood all too well the lure of the sacred. His public persona proclaimed him to be unlike his contemporaries; he was a genius, plucked from obscurity by providence to pursue his vital mission. He had no equals and no mentors, only followers. He had emerged, fully formed, beholden to no-one, a man apart. He was not a politician – he was a messiah. Remarkably perhaps, this public image – carefully crafted though it was – was not particularly successful by itself. Hitler’s Nazis languished in the polls through the 1920s, hampered not only by the speaking ban imposed upon their leader between 1925 and 1927, but also by the improvements in the German economy and stabilisation in domestic and international politics, all of which made Hitler’s radical vision less attractive. A dictator’s death: how Stalin, Hitler, Mao and other self-styled strongmen met their ends Eva Braun: life with Adolf Hitler In 1928, for instance, the Nazi Party polled just 2.6 per cent of the vote nationally, coming a poor ninth in the election with barely 800,000 votes, just ahead of the German Farmers’ Party. For all his messianic pretensions, Hitler was scarcely getting his message across. His party was flirting with insignificance. What changed, of course, was the Great Depression – the world economic crisis that resulted from the Wall Street Crash of October 1929. As foreign capital investment dried up in the aftermath, the German economic recovery stalled and was tipped into recession. Within months, German businesses were closing, staff were being laid off and wages were falling. By the end of 1930, German unemployment had already more than doubled to three million; by 1932, it would double again, totalling 30 per cent of the working population. Why was the Wall Street Crash an opportunity for Hitler? When the American stock market crashed in October 1929, the consequences were felt across the world, but perhaps most spectacularly in Germany. There, where the economic recovery of the 1920s had been largely funded by American loans and investments, the resulting removal of those funds tipped the German economy into a catastrophic deflationary spiral, with wages shrinking, businesses folding and a huge growth in unemployment. This would have been difficult enough for the German people, but additionally their economy had only recently recovered from the hyperinflation crisis of 1923, in which the money-printing policy of World War I, and its aftermath, caused the total collapse of the German currency. These two economic crises in tandem would have profound political consequences, weakening the already fragile public faith in capitalism and contributing to a paralysis in government, which in turn undermined the German political system. The primary beneficiary of all this upheaval was Hitler’s Nazi Party, which duly rose to become the largest party in the parliament by 1932. In January of the following year, Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany. In such circumstances, Hitler’s message of a radical reshaping of the economy and society found a ready echo. The German electorate, steeled perhaps against a single crisis, had endured two debilitating economic agonies in six years – the hyperinflation of 1923, and the Great Depression of 1929 – so it was little wonder, perhaps, that their faith in capitalism and democracy was evaporating. It would primarily be Hitler’s Nazis who reaped the electoral rewards, benefiting from a flight from the political centre that saw them rise from 2.6 per cent of the vote in 1928 to 37 per cent in 1932. The problem of Hitler's niece However, just as the stars appeared to be aligning for Hitler, a new crisis erupted that threatened to derail his career and dent that polished public image. In September 1931, Hitler’s 23-year-old niece, Angela ‘Geli’ Raubal, committed suicide in his Munich apartment, using his pistol. Raubal had been living with Hitler for some time, and the relationship appears – despite countless rumours to the contrary – to have been purely platonic. Vivacious and quick-witted, Raubal was Hitler’s regular companion to cultural and political events, referring to him as Uncle Alf. The reason for her suicide is not clear. There had been difficulties between the two in the months leading up to her death, with Raubal keen to move to Vienna to pursue a singing career, and Hitler adamant she should stay in Munich to complete her studies. She had also had a brief relationship with Hitler’s chauffeur, Emil Maurice, which Hitler had disapproved of, and put an end to. It is perhaps most likely that Raubal, in a fit of melancholy, was looking for a way to give voice to her unhappiness. Her suicide may have been a cry for help gone tragically wrong. In the aftermath, no speculation was too lurid for the German press, spurred – quite naturally – by Hitler’s political opponents. The nature of the relationship between Raubal and her ‘Uncle Alf’ was an obvious focus, and the tabloids of the day conjectured wildly whether Hitler might be a masochist engaged in an incestuous affair, or that Raubal might have been pregnant with his child, or that she was murdered on his orders. In response, the Nazi Party was forced into an urgent damage-limitation exercise, as their leader and their recent electoral gains risked being swept away by a rising tide of sordid innuendo. Hitler, for his part, issued a formal rebuttal of the rumours and demanded a retraction from the press. The party machine, meanwhile, mounted an attempt to repackage its leader. The oddball, otherworldly messiah-figure had now, overnight, become something of an electoral liability, so Hitler would be recast as a chaste, cultured aesthete; more statesman than prophet. As so often, it was Heinrich Hoffmann who led the propaganda charge. In 1932, six months after Raubal's death, he published a glossy picture volume entitled Hitler, wie ihn keiner kennt (The Hitler Nobody Knows), which showcased Hitler's domesticity, portraying him as a man of simple pleasures, most at home in the Bavarian mountains or alone with his dog. For the first time, Hitler’s private life, or at least a sanitised facsimile of it, became a weapon in the public relations fight. Where previously what he did away from the political stage was kept deliberately opaque – messiahs, after all, did not have private lives – now it was harnessed to the political cause. Hitler would be actively portrayed as an ordinary citizen; an educated and cultured bachelor; a man of old-fashioned Viennese manners; a kisser of ladies’ hands; a gracious patron who enjoyed the open air, was kind to children and animals, and was above all passionately devoted to the German people. It was a fabricated image, of course, just as much as his earlier incarnation as a messiah had been, but it worked. The political fall-out from Raubal’s death was restricted, and the Nazi bandwagon rolled on. In late January 1933, Hitler was appointed German Chancellor. Barely two months later, on 24 March, he forced the Enabling Act through the Reichstag using intimidation and coercion to secure votes. The act allowed Hitler to pass laws without scrutiny – elevating him to the position of dictator. Read more about the Night of the Long Knives, that established Hitler as Germany's 'supreme leader' Was Hitler the first modern politician? When examining Hitler’s rise, it is conventional – and perfectly correct – to look primarily at those factors that were most directly influential: the economic crisis of 1929, the resulting collapse of the political centre, and the toxic sense of grievance and humiliation that had so poisoned German society in the 1920s. Yet, alongside those headline contributors, it is important also to examine the influence of less well-known factors. The invention, maintenance and metamorphosis behind Hitler’s public image is one such element, and one that rarely receives the attention that it deserves. What happened after the concentration camps were liberated? In the modern day, every political figure is required, to some degree, to manufacture a public image. We regard it as essential. But what is remarkable here is that Hitler was doing it – and the extent to which he was doing it – in the 1920s, when few of his contemporaries were even aware of the dark arts of spin-doctoring and image management. In this respect, therefore, it is appropriate to regard Hitler as one of the first truly modern politicians. This content first appeared in the June 2018 issue of BBC History Revealed