Franz Halder
Franz Halder was a German general and the chief of the Oberkommando des Heeres staff from 1938 until September 1942, when he was dismissed after frequent disagreements with Adolf Hitler. During the invasion of the Soviet Union Halder insisted on focusing on Moscow, despite Hitler's objections; until December 1941 Halder's military position corresponded to the old Chief of the General Staff position, which during World War I had been the highest military office in the German Imperial Army. Halder's diary during his time as chief of OKH General Staff has been a source for authors that have written about such subjects as Hitler, World War II, the Nazi Party. In William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Halder's diary is cited hundreds of times. Halder was born in the son of General Max Halder. In 1902, he joined the 3rd Royal Bavarian Field Artillery Regiment in Munich, he was promoted to lieutenant in 1904, upon graduation from War School in Munich he attended Artillery School and the Bavarian Staff College, both in Munich.
In 1914, Halder became an Ordnance Officer, serving in the Headquarters of the Bavarian 3rd Army Corps. In August, 1915 he was promoted to Hauptmann on the General Staff of the 6th Army. During 1917 he served as a General Staff officer in the Headquarters of the 2nd Army, before being transferred to the 4th Army. Between 1919 and 1920 Halder served with the Reichswehr War Ministry Training Branch. Between 1921 and 1923 he was a Tactics Instructor with the Wehrkreis VII in Munich. In March 1924 Halder was promoted to major and by 1926 he served as the Director of Operations on the General Staff of the Wehrkreis VII in Munich. In February 1929 he was promoted to Oberstleutnant, from October 1929 through late 1931 he served on the Training staff in the Reichswehr Ministry. After being promoted to Oberst in December 1931, Halder served as the Chief of Staff, Wehrkreis Kdo VI, in Münster through early 1934. During the 1930s the German military staff thought that Poland might attack the detached German province of East Prussia and developed plans to defend East Prussia.
After being promoted to Generalmajor in October 1934, Halder served as the Commander of the 7th Infantry Division in Munich. Recognized as a fine staff officer and planner, in August 1936 Halder was promoted to Generalleutnant, he became the director of the Manoeuvres Staff. Shortly thereafter, he became director of the Training Branch, on the General Staff of the Army, in Berlin between October 1937 and February 1938. During this period he directed important training maneuvers, the largest held since the reintroduction of conscription in 1935. On 1 February 1938 Halder was promoted to General der Artillerie. Around this date General Wilhelm Keitel was attempting to reorganize the entire upper leadership of the German Army. Keitel had asked Halder to become Chief of the General Staff and report to General Walther von Reichenau. However, Halder declined as he felt he could not work with Reichenau well, due to a personality dispute; as Keitel recognized Halder's superior military planning skills, Keitel met with Hitler and enticed him to appoint General Walther von Brauchitsch as commander-in-chief of the German Army.
Halder accepted becoming Chief of the General Staff of the Army on 1 September 1938, succeeded General Ludwig Beck. A week Halder presented plans to Hitler on how to invade Czechoslovakia with a pincer movement by General Gerd von Rundstedt and General Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb. Instead, Hitler directed. Neither invasion plan was necessary once Mussolini persuaded Hitler and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain back to the bargaining table in Munich. In the run up to the war, Halder — in an attempt to avoid what they were certain would be a catastrophic war for Germany — was the main actor in a plot with several other generals in the Wehrmacht and Abwehr to remove Hitler from power. A plot was put in place, ready to go at Halder's command, which would be given if Hitler gave the order to proceed with the planned invasion; the plot included a plan to kill Hitler and say "he died trying to escape". However, on 29 September Chamberlain capitulated to Hitler’s demands, the British and French surrendered the German populated Czech region of Sudetenland to Germany, with Hitler promising this would be his final territorial demand.
Halder put an immediate stop to the coup attempt, only hours away from reality, as peace had been preserved for the moment. Chamberlain's appeasement at Munich meant the end of the plot, which shook Halder to the core and left him weeping according to Halder's former adjutant, Burkhard Mueler-Hildebrand. There would be the UK over the Sudetenland. Hitler's popularity reached an all-time high. A coup was not possible, nor desirable; the catastrophe Halder and the other generals feared. On 1 October German troops entered the Sudetenland. Halder participated in the strategic planning for all operations in the first part of the war. For his role in the planning and preparing of the invasion of Poland he received the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross on 27 October 1939. On 1 September 1939, Germany invaded Poland, resulting in declarations of war by France and the British Empire. On 19 September, Halder noted in his diary that he had received information from SS-Gruppenführ
William L. Shirer
William Lawrence Shirer was an American journalist and war correspondent. He wrote The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a history of Nazi Germany, read by many and cited in scholarly works for more than 50 years. A foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and the International News Service, Shirer was the first reporter hired by Edward R. Murrow for what would become a CBS radio team of journalists known as "Murrow's Boys", he became known for his broadcasts from Berlin, from the rise of the Nazi dictatorship through the first year of World War II. With Murrow, he organized the first broadcast world news roundup, a format still followed by news broadcasts. Shirer wrote more than a dozen books besides The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, including Berlin Diary. Born in Chicago in 1904, Shirer attended Washington High School and Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, he graduated from Coe in 1925. Working his way to Europe on a cattle boat to spend the summer there, he remained in Europe for 15 years.
He was European correspondent for the Chicago Tribune from 1925 to 1932, covering Europe, the Near East and India. In India he formed a friendship with Mohandas Gandhi. Shirer lived and worked in France for several years starting in 1925, he left in the early 1930s but returned to Paris throughout the decade. He lived and worked in Nazi Germany from 1934 to 1940. In 1931, Shirer married an Austrian photographer; the couple had two daughters and Linda. Shirer and his wife divorced in 1970. In 1972 he married Martha Pelton, whom he divorced in 1975, his third marriage was to a long-time teacher of Russian at Simon's Rock College. Shirer and Irina had no children. Shirer was residing in Massachusetts at the time of his death; as a print journalist and as a radio reporter for CBS, Shirer covered the strengthening one-party rule in Nazi Germany beginning in 1933. Shirer reported on Adolf Hitler's peacetime triumphs like the return of the Saarland to Germany and the remilitarization of the Rhineland. Shirer was hired in 1934 for the Berlin bureau of the Universal Service, one of William Randolph Hearst's two wire services.
In Berlin Diary, Shirer described this move, in a self-proclaimed bad pun, as going from "bad to Hearst". When Universal Service folded in August 1937, Shirer was first taken on as second man by Hearst's other wire service, International News Service laid off a few weeks later. On the day when Shirer received two weeks' notice from INS, he received a wire from Edward R. Murrow, European manager of Columbia Broadcasting System, suggesting that the two meet. At their meeting a few days in Berlin, Murrow said that he couldn't cover all of Europe from London and that he was seeking an experienced correspondent to open a CBS office on the Continent, he offered Shirer a job subject to an audition—a "trial broadcast"—to let CBS directors and vice presidents in New York judge Shirer's voice. Shirer feared that his reedy voice was unsuitable for radio; as European bureau chief, he set up headquarters in Vienna, a more central and more neutral spot than Berlin. His job was to arrange broadcasts, early in his career he expressed disappointment at having to hire newspaper correspondents to do the broadcasting.
Shirer was the first of "Murrow's Boys", broadcast journalists who provided news coverage during World War II and afterward. CBS's prohibition of correspondents talking on the radio, viewed by Murrow and Shirer as "absurd", ended in March 1938. Shirer was in Vienna on March 11, 1938, when the German annexation of Austria took place after weeks of mounting pressure by Nazi Germany on the Austrian government; as the only American broadcaster in Vienna, Shirer had a scoop but lacked the facilities to report it to his audience. Occupying German troops controlling the Austrian state radio studio would not let him broadcast. At Murrow's suggestion, Shirer flew to London via Berlin. Once in London, Shirer broadcast the first uncensored eyewitness account of the annexation. Meanwhile, Murrow flew from London to Vienna to cover for Shirer; the next day, CBS's New York headquarters asked Shirer and Murrow to produce a European roundup, a 30-minute broadcast featuring live reporting from five European capitals: Berlin, Paris and London.
The broadcast, arranged in eight hours using the telephone and broadcasting facilities of the day, was a major feat. This first news roundup established a formula still used in broadcast journalism, it was the genesis of what became CBS World News Roundup, still on the network each morning and evening, network broadcasting's oldest news series. Shirer reported on the Munich Agreement and Hitler's occupation of Czechoslovakia before reporting on the growing tensions between Germany and Poland in 1939 and the German invasion of Poland that launched World War II on September 1, 1939. During much of the pre-war period, Shirer was based in Berlin and attended Hitler's speeches and several party rallies in Nuremberg; when war broke out on the Western Front in 1940, Shirer moved forward with the German troops, reporting firsthand on the German "Blitzkrieg". Shirer reported on the invasion of Denmark and Norway in April from Berlin and on the invasion of the Netherlands, Luxembour
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany is the common English name for Germany between 1933 and 1945, when Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party controlled the country through a dictatorship. Under Hitler's rule, Germany was transformed into a totalitarian state that controlled nearly all aspects of life via the Gleichschaltung legal process; the official name of the state was Deutsches Reich until 1943 and Großdeutsches Reich from 1943 to 1945. Nazi Germany is known as the Third Reich, meaning "Third Realm" or "Third Empire", the first two being the Holy Roman Empire and the German Empire; the Nazi regime ended. Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany by the President of the Weimar Republic, Paul von Hindenburg, on 30 January 1933; the NSDAP began to eliminate all political opposition and consolidate its power. Hindenburg died on 2 August 1934 and Hitler became dictator of Germany by merging the offices and powers of the Chancellery and Presidency. A national referendum held 19 August 1934 confirmed Hitler as sole Führer of Germany.
All power was centralised in Hitler's person and his word became the highest law. The government was not a coordinated, co-operating body, but a collection of factions struggling for power and Hitler's favour. In the midst of the Great Depression, the Nazis restored economic stability and ended mass unemployment using heavy military spending and a mixed economy. Extensive public works were undertaken, including the construction of Autobahnen; the return to economic stability boosted the regime's popularity. Racism antisemitism, was a central feature of the regime; the Germanic peoples were considered by the Nazis to be the master race, the purest branch of the Aryan race. Discrimination and persecution against Jews and Romani people began in earnest after the seizure of power; the first concentration camps were established in March 1933. Jews and others deemed undesirable were imprisoned, liberals and communists were killed, imprisoned, or exiled. Christian churches and citizens that opposed Hitler's rule were oppressed, many leaders imprisoned.
Education focused on racial biology, population policy, fitness for military service. Career and educational opportunities for women were curtailed. Recreation and tourism were organised via the Strength Through Joy program, the 1936 Summer Olympics showcased Germany on the international stage. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels made effective use of film, mass rallies, Hitler's hypnotic oratory to influence public opinion; the government controlled artistic expression, promoting specific art forms and banning or discouraging others. The Nazi regime dominated neighbours through military threats in the years leading up to war. Nazi Germany made aggressive territorial demands, threatening war if these were not met, it seized Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938 and 1939. Germany signed a non-aggression pact with the USSR, invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, launching World War II in Europe. By early 1941, Germany controlled much of Europe. Reichskommissariats took control of conquered areas and a German administration was established in the remainder of Poland.
Germany exploited labour of both its occupied territories and its allies. In the Holocaust, millions of Jews and other peoples deemed undesirable by the state were imprisoned, murdered in Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps, or shot. While the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 was successful, the Soviet resurgence and entry of the US into the war meant the Wehrmacht lost the initiative on the Eastern Front in 1943 and by late 1944 had been pushed back to the pre-1939 border. Large-scale aerial bombing of Germany escalated in 1944 and the Axis powers were driven back in Eastern and Southern Europe. After the Allied invasion of France, Germany was conquered by the Soviet Union from the east and the other Allies from the west, capitulated in May 1945. Hitler's refusal to admit defeat led to massive destruction of German infrastructure and additional war-related deaths in the closing months of the war; the victorious Allies initiated a policy of denazification and put many of the surviving Nazi leadership on trial for war crimes at the Nuremberg trials.
The official name of the state was Deutsches Reich from 1933 to 1943 and Großdeutsches Reich from 1943 to 1945, while common English terms are "Nazi Germany" and "Third Reich". The latter, adopted by Nazi propaganda as Drittes Reich, was first used in Das Dritte Reich, a 1923 book by Arthur Moeller van den Bruck; the book counted the Holy Roman Empire as the German Empire as the second. Germany was known as the Weimar Republic during the years 1919 to 1933, it was a republic with a semi-presidential system. The Weimar Republic faced numerous problems, including hyperinflation, political extremism, contentious relationships with the Allied victors of World War I, a series of failed attempts at coalition government by divided political parties. Severe setbacks to the German economy began after World War I ended because of reparations payments required under the 1919 Treaty of Versailles; the government printed money to make the payments and to repay the country's war debt, but the resulting hyperinflation led to inflated prices for consumer goods, economic chaos, food riots.
When the government defaulted on their reparations payments in January 1923, French troops occupied German industrial areas along the Ruhr and widespread civil unrest followed. The National Socialist German Workers' Party (National
Hugh Trevor-Roper
Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper, Baron Dacre of Glanton, was a British historian of early modern Britain and Nazi Germany. He was Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford. Trevor-Roper was a polemicist and essayist on a range of historical topics, but England in the 16th and 17th centuries and Nazi Germany. In the view of John Kenyon, "some of short essays have affected the way we think about the past more than other men's books"; this is echoed by Richard Davenport-Hines and Adam Sisman in the introduction to One Hundred Letters from Hugh Trevor-Roper: "The bulk of his publications is formidable... Some of his essays are of Victorian length. All of them reduce large subjects to their essence. Many of them... have lastingly transformed their fields." On the other hand, his biographer Adam Sisman writes that "the mark of a great historian is that he writes great books, on the subject which he has made his own. By this exacting standard Hugh failed."Trevor-Roper's most read and financially rewarding book was titled The Last Days of Hitler.
It emerged from his assignment as a British intelligence officer in 1945 to discover what happened in the last days of Hitler's bunker. From his interviews with a range of witnesses and study of surviving documents he demonstrated that Hitler was dead and had not escaped from Berlin, he showed that Hitler's dictatorship was not an efficient unified machine but a hodge-podge of overlapping rivalries. Trevor-Roper's reputation was "severely damaged" in 1983 when he authenticated the Hitler Diaries shortly before they were shown to be forgeries. Trevor-Roper was born at Glanton, England, the son of Kathleen Elizabeth Davidson and Bertie William Edward Trevor-Roper, a doctor, descended from Henry Roper, 8th Baron Teynham, who married as her second husband Anne, 16th Baroness Dacre. Trevor-Roper "enjoyed... that he was a collateral descendant of William Roper, the son-in-law and biographer of Sir Thomas More... as a boy he was aware that only a dozen lives separated him from inheriting the Teynham peerage."Trevor-Roper's brother Patrick became a leading eye surgeon and gay rights activist.
Trevor-Roper was educated at Belhaven Hill School and Christ Church, where he read first Classics and Modern History moving to Merton College, Oxford, to become a Research Fellow. Whilst at Oxford, he was a member of the exclusive Stubbs Society, was initiated as a Freemason in the Apollo University Lodge. Trevor-Roper took a first-class degree in Classical Moderations in 1934 and won the Craven, the Ireland and the Hertford scholarships in Classics, he intended to make his career in the Classics, but became bored with what he regarded as the pedantic technical aspects of the classics course at Oxford, switched to History, where he obtained a first-class honours in 1936. Trevor-Roper's first book was a 1940 biography of Archbishop William Laud, in which he challenged many of the prevailing perceptions surrounding Laud. During World War II, Trevor-Roper served as an officer in the Radio Security Service of the Secret Intelligence Service, on the interception of messages from the German intelligence service, the Abwehr.
In early 1940, Trevor-Roper and E. W. B. Gill decrypted some of these intercepts, demonstrating the relevance of the material and spurring Bletchley Park efforts to decrypt the traffic. Intelligence from Abwehr traffic played an important part in many operations including the Double-Cross System, he formed a low opinion of most pre-war professional intelligence agents, but a higher one of some of the post-1939 recruits. In The Philby Affair Trevor-Roper argues that the Soviet spy Kim Philby was never in a position to undermine efforts by the chief of German Military Intelligence Abwehr, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, to overthrow the Nazi regime and negotiate with the British government. In November 1945, Trevor-Roper was ordered by Dick White, the head of counter-intelligence in the British sector of Berlin, to investigate the circumstances of Adolf Hitler's death, to rebut the Soviet propaganda that Hitler was alive and living in the West. Using the alias of "Major Oughton", Trevor-Roper interviewed or prepared questions for several officials and low, present in the Führerbunker with Hitler, and, able to escape to the West, including Bernd Freytag von Loringhoven.
For the most part Trevor-Roper relied on investigations and interviews by hundreds of British and Canadian intelligence officers. He did not have access to Soviet materials. Working Trevor-Roper drafted his report, which served as the basis for his most famous book, The Last Days of Hitler in which he described the last ten days of Hitler's life, the fates of some of the higher-ranking members of the inner circle as well of key lesser figures. Trevor-Roper transformed the evidence into a literary work, with sardonic humour and drama, was much influenced by the prose styles of two of his favourite historians, Edward Gibbon and Lord Macaulay; the book was cleared by British officials in 1946 for publication as soon as the war crimes trials ended. It was published in English in 1947. According to American journalist Ron Rosenbaum, Trevor-Roper received a letter from Lisbon written in Hebrew stating that the Stern Gang would assassinate him for The Last Days of Hitler, which they considered portrayed Hitler as a "demoniacal" figure but let ordinary Germans who followed Hitler off the hook, for this he deserved to die.
Rosenbaum reports that Trevor-Roper to
Joseph Goebbels
Paul Joseph Goebbels was a German Nazi politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. He was one of Adolf Hitler's closest and most devoted associates, was known for his skills in public speaking and his virulent antisemitism, evident in his publicly voiced views, he advocated progressively harsher discrimination, including the extermination of the Jews in the Holocaust. Goebbels, who aspired to be an author, obtained a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Heidelberg in 1921, he joined the Nazi Party in 1924, worked with Gregor Strasser in their northern branch. He was appointed Gauleiter for Berlin in 1926, where he began to take an interest in the use of propaganda to promote the party and its programme. After the Nazi's seizure of power in 1933, Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry gained and exerted control over the news media and information in Germany, he was adept at using the new media of radio and film for propaganda purposes. Topics for party propaganda included antisemitism, attacks on the Christian churches, attempting to shape morale.
In 1943, Goebbels began to pressure Hitler to introduce measures that would produce total war, including closing businesses not essential to the war effort, conscripting women into the labour force, enlisting men in exempt occupations into the Wehrmacht. Hitler appointed him as Reich Plenipotentiary for Total War on 23 July 1944, whereby Goebbels undertook unsuccessful measures to increase the number of people available for armaments manufacure and the Wehrmacht; as the war drew to a close and Nazi Germany faced defeat, Magda Goebbels and the Goebbels children joined him in Berlin. They moved into the underground Vorbunker, part of Hitler's underground bunker complex, on 22 April 1945. Hitler committed suicide on 30 April. In accordance with Hitler's will, Goebbels succeeded him as Chancellor of Germany; the following day and his wife committed suicide, after poisoning their six children with cyanide. Paul Joseph Goebbels was born on 29 October 1897 in Rheydt, an industrial town south of Mönchengladbach near Düsseldorf.
Both of his parents were Roman Catholics with modest family backgrounds. His father Fritz was a factory clerk. Goebbels had five siblings: Konrad, Maria and Maria, who married the German filmmaker Max W. Kimmich in 1938. In 1932, Goebbels published a pamphlet of his family tree to refute the rumours that his grandmother was of Jewish ancestry. During childhood, Goebbels suffered from ill health, which included a long bout of inflammation of the lungs, he had a deformed right foot. It was shorter than his left foot, he underwent a failed operation to correct it just prior to starting grammar school. Goebbels wore a metal brace and special shoe because of his shortened leg, walked with a limp, he was rejected for military service in World War I due to this deformity. Goebbels was educated at a Christian Gymnasium, where he completed his Abitur in 1917, he was the top student of his class and was given the traditional honour to speak at the awards ceremony. His parents hoped that he would become a Catholic priest, Goebbels considered it.
He studied literature and history at the universities of Bonn, Würzburg and Munich, aided by a scholarship from the Albertus Magnus Society. By this time Goebbels had begun to distance himself from the church. Historians, including Richard J. Evans and Roger Manvell, speculate that Goebbels' lifelong pursuit of women may have been in compensation for his physical disability. At Freiburg, he met and fell in love with Anka Stalherm, three years his senior, she went on to Würzburg to continue school. In 1921 he wrote a semi-autobiographical novel, Michael, a three-part work of which only Parts I and III have survived. Goebbels felt he was writing his "own story". Antisemitic content and material about a charismatic leader may have been added by Goebbels shortly before the book was published in 1929 by Eher-Verlag, the publishing house of the Nazi Party. By 1920, the relationship with Anka was over; the break-up filled Goebbels with thoughts of suicide. At the University of Heidelberg, Goebbels wrote his doctoral thesis on Wilhelm von Schütz, a minor 19th century romantic dramatist.
He had hoped to write his thesis under the supervision of a literary historian. It did not seem to bother Goebbels. Gundolf was no longer teaching, so directed Goebbels to associate professor Max Freiherr von Waldberg. Waldberg Jewish, recommended Goebbels write his thesis on Wilhelm von Schütz. After submitting the thesis and passing his oral examination, Goebbels earned his PhD in 1921. By 1940 he had written 14 books. Goebbels worked as a private tutor, he found work as a journalist and was published in the local newspaper. His writing during that time dislike for modern culture. In the summer of 1922, he began a love affair with Else Janke, a schoolteacher. After she revealed to him that she was half-Jewish, Goebbels stated the "enchantment ruined." He continued to see her on and off until 1927. He continued for several years to try to become a published author, his diaries, which he began in 1923 and continued for the rest of his life, p
Anti-German sentiment
Anti-German sentiment is defined as an opposition to or fear of Germany, its inhabitants, its culture and the German language. Its opposite is Germanophilia; the sentiment began with the mid-19th century unification of Germany, which made the new nation a rival to the Great Powers of Europe on economic, cultural and military grounds. In the 1860s Russia experienced an outbreak of Germanophobia restricted to a small group of writers in St. Petersburg who had united around a right-wing newspaper, it began in 1864 with the publication of an article by a writer who proposed that Poland be given autonomy and that the privileges of the German barons in the Baltic governorates and Finland be preserved. Mikhail Katkov published a harsh criticism of the article in the Moscow News, which in turn caused a flood of angry articles in which Russian writers expressed their irritation with Europeans, some of which featured direct attacks on Germans; the following year, 1865, the 100th anniversary of the death of Mikhail Lomonosov was marked throughout the Russian empire.
Articles were published mentioning the difficulties Lomonosov had encountered from the foreign members of the Russian Academy of Sciences, most of whom had been of German descent. The authors criticized contemporary German scholars for their neglect of the Russian language and for printing articles in foreign languages while receiving funds from the Russian people, it was further suggested by some writers that Russian citizens of German origin who did not speak Russian and follow the Orthodox faith should be considered foreigners. It was proposed that people of German descent be forbidden from holding diplomatic posts as they might not have "solidarity with respect to Russia". Despite the press campaign against Germans, Germanophobic feelings did not develop in Russia to any widespread extent, died out, due to the Imperial family's German roots and the presence of many German names in the Russian political elite. Negative comments about Germany had begun to appear in Britain in the 1870s, following the Prussian victory in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870–71.
Criticisms were expressed in the press and in the birth of the invasion novel, many of which focused on the idea that Britain might be Germany's next victim. In 1887, the label Made in Germany was introduced, to get British buyers to adhere to the concept of "buying British". After suffering slight losses, German manufacturers soon found the label to be of good use. In the 1890s there was widespread hostility towards foreigners in Britain directed against eastern European Jews but including Germans. Joseph Bannister believed that German residents in Britain were "gambling-house keepers, hotel-porters, barbers,'bullies', runaway conscripts, bath-attendants, street musicians, bakers, cheap clerks, etc". Interviewees for the Royal Commission on Alien Immigration believed that Germans were involved in prostitution and burglary, many people viewed Germans working in Britain as threatening the livelihood of Britons by being willing to work for longer hours. Anti-German hostility deepened since early 1896 after the Kruger telegram of Kaiser Wilhelm II, in which he congratulated President Kruger of the Transvaal on resisting the British Jameson Raid.
Attacks on Germans in London were reported in the German press at the time but do not appear to have occurred. The Saturday Review suggested "be ready to fight Germany, as Germania delenda est"; the Kaiser's reputation was further degraded by the Daily Telegraph Affair. In the 19th century the mass influx of German immigrants which made them the largest group of Americans by ancestry today, resulted in nativist reactionary movements not unlike those of the contemporary Western world; these would culminate in 1844 with the establishment of the Know-Nothing Party, which had an xenaphobic stance. One of many incidents described in a 19th century account included the blocking of a funeral procession in New York by a group who proceeded to hurl insults at the pallbearers. Incidents such as these led to more meetings of Germans who would establish fraternal groups such as the Sons of Hermann in 1840, having been founded as a means to "improve and foster German customs and the spread of benevolence among Germans in the United States".
Following the signing of the Entente Cordiale in 1904 between Britain and France, official relationships cooled as did popular attitudes towards Germany and German residents in Britain. A fear of German militarism replaced a previous admiration for German literature. At the same time, journalists produced a stream of articles on the threat posed by Germany. In the Daily Telegraph Affair of 1908–1909, the Kaiser humiliated himself and further soured relations by his intemperate attacks on Britain. In 1894 Alfred Harmsworth commissioned author William Le Queux to write the serial novel The Great War in England in 1897, which featured France and Russia combining forces to crush Britain, who was, with German intervention, able to rally a force to turn the tide. Twelve years Harmsworth asked him to change sentiment, promising the full support of his formidable advertising capabilities; the result was the bestselling The Invasion of 1910, which appeared in serial form in the Daily Mail in 1906 and has been referred to by historians as inducing an atmosphere of paranoia, mass hysteria and Germanophobia that would climax in the Naval Scare of 1908–09.
Articles in the Daily Mail advocated anti-German
Totalitarianism
Totalitarianism is a political concept of a mode of government that prohibits opposition parties, restricts individual opposition to the state and its claims, exercises an high degree of control over public and private life. It is regarded as the most complete form of authoritarianism. Political power in totalitarian states has been held by rule by one leader which employ all-encompassing propaganda campaigns broadcast by state-controlled mass media. Totalitarian regimes are marked by political repression, personality cultism, control over the economy, restriction of speech, mass surveillance and widespread use of state terrorism. Historian Robert Conquest describes a "totalitarian" state as one recognizing no limits to its authority in any sphere of public or private life and which extends that authority to whatever length feasible; the concept was first developed in the 1920s by both Weimar jurist Carl Schmitt and, concurrently, by the Italian fascists. Italian fascist Benito Mussolini said "Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state".
Schmitt used the term Totalstaat in his influential 1927 work on the legal basis of an all-powerful state, The Concept of the Political. The term gained prominence in Western anti-communist political discourse during the Cold War era as a tool to convert pre-war anti-fascism into postwar anti-communism. Totalitarian regimes are different from other authoritarian ones; the latter denotes a state in which the single power holder – an individual "dictator", a committee or a junta or an otherwise small group of political elite – monopolizes political power. " authoritarian state is only concerned with political power and as long as, not contested it gives society a certain degree of liberty". Authoritarianism "does not attempt to change the world and human nature". In contrast, a totalitarian regime attempts to control all aspects of the social life, including the economy, art, private life and morals of citizens; some totalitarian governments may promote an elaborate ideology: "The proclaimed ideology penetrates into the deepest reaches of societal structure and the totalitarian government seeks to control the thoughts and actions of its citizens".
It mobilizes the whole population in pursuit of its goals. Carl Joachim Friedrich writes that "a totalist ideology, a party reinforced by a secret police, monopoly control of industrial mass society" are the three features of totalitarian regimes that distinguish them from other autocracies; the notion of totalitarianism as a "total" political power by the state was formulated in 1923 by Giovanni Amendola, who described Italian Fascism as a system fundamentally different from conventional dictatorships. The term was assigned a positive meaning in the writings of Giovanni Gentile, Italy’s most prominent philosopher and leading theorist of fascism, he used the term totalitario to refer to the structure and goals of the new state, which were to provide the "total representation of the nation and total guidance of national goals". He described totalitarianism as a society in which the ideology of the state had influence, if not power, over most of its citizens. According to Benito Mussolini, this system politicizes everything spiritual and human: "Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state".
One of the first to use the term "totalitarianism" in the English language was the Austrian writer Franz Borkenau in his 1938 book The Communist International, in which he commented that it united the Soviet and German dictatorships more than it divided them. The label "totalitarian" was twice affixed to the Hitler regime during Winston Churchill's speech of October 5, 1938 before the House of Commons in opposition to the Munich Agreement, by which France and Great Britain consented to Nazi Germany's annexation of the Sudetenland. Churchill was a backbencher MP representing the Epping constituency. In a radio address two weeks Churchill again employed the term, this time applying the concept to "a Communist or a Nazi tyranny"; the leader of the historic Spanish reactionary conservative party called the Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous Right declared his intention to "give Spain a true unity, a new spirit, a totalitarian polity" and went on to say: "Democracy is not an end but a means to the conquest of the new state.
When the time comes, either parliament submits or we will eliminate it". George Orwell made frequent use of the word totalitarian and its cognates in multiple essays published in 1940, 1941 and 1942. In his essay Why I Write, he wrote: "The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood; every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it". During a 1945 lecture series entitled The Soviet Impact on the Western World, the pro-Soviet British historian E. H. Carr claimed: "The trend away from individualism and towards totalitarianism is everywhere unmistakable" and that Marxism–Leninism was by far the most successful type of totalitarianism as proved by Soviet industrial growth and the Red Army's role in defeating Germany. Only the "blind and incurable" could ignore the trend towards totalitarianism, said Carr. In The Open Society and Its Enemies and The Poverty of Historicism, Karl Popper articulated an influential critique of totalitarianism: in both works, he contrasted the "open society" of liberal democracy with totalitarianism and argued that the latter is grounded in the belief that history moves toward an immutable future in accordance with knowable laws.
In The Or
