Black Tulip: The Life and Myth of Erich Hartmann, the World’s Top Fighter Ace...
Black Tulip is the dramatic story of history’s top fighter ace, Luftwaffe pilot Erich Hartmann. It’s also the story of how his service under Hitler was simplified and elevated to Western mythology during the Cold War.
Over 1,404 wartime missions, Hartmann claimed a staggering 352 airborne kills, and his career contains all the dramas you would expect. There were the frostbitten fighter sweeps over the Eastern Front, drunken forays to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest, a decade of imprisonment in the wretched Soviet POW camps, and further military service during the Cold War that ended with conflict and angst.
Books Heinrich Himmler was the commander of the SS, and as founder and officer-in-charge of the Nazi concentration camps and the Einsatzgruppen death squads, he was responsible for implementing the extermination of millions of people. By the time he died, he was the second-most powerful man in Germany and regarded himself as Hitler's natural successor.
Books Heinrich Himmler was the commander of the SS, and as founder and officer-in-charge of the Nazi concentration camps and the Einsatzgruppen death squads, he was responsible for implementing the extermination of millions of people. By the time he died he was the second-most powerful man in Germany and regarded himself as Hitler's natural successor.
Part Two...
The Voice of the Nazi Who was the first Lord
Haw-Haw? Was it the traitor Norman Baillie -
Stewart, or an anglophile German who read P
G Wodehouse and rounded off his broadcasts with the expression 'hearty cheerios'?
Denys Blakeway investigates and talks to surviving traitors and Nazi sympathisers whose blend of lies and half-truths mesmerised British listeners in the early years of the war.
Both parts are from 1991...
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k65rXc_N15g
Truth-tellers and cover-up artists: John Sweeney takes a classic example from Stalin's great famine of the 1930s which killed up to 10 million peasants, with a famous and feted journalist Walter Duranty reporting in the New York Times that there was no famine and very few deaths, and ridiculing another journalist, Gareth Jones (once David Lloyd George's private secretary), who had defied a state ban to go and see the suffering for himself and reported the horrible truth. Duranty later won a Pulitzer; Jones was killed in China in mysterious circumstances.
In 'But They Are Only Russians' - a dismissive phrase used by Duranty when admitting privately to western officials that thousands were dying - John Sweeney investigates the truth-tellers and the cover-up artists, their motivation, their fate, and why it is that the public always finds it easier to believe in a fantasy rather than a reality.
Sweeney has been to Ukraine, following in the footsteps of Jones, and meeting a few aged famine survivors, who tell him of desperate hunger driving many to cannibalism. He visits and reports from Stalin's villa and one of his gulags, and observes that in Vladimir Putin's Russia, where only 'positive history' is promoted, Stalin is being rehabilitated and school-books reducing the history of the famine to half a page.
He talks to Doris Lessing, who confesses to having been duped into promoting Stalin's vision of a society, and he hears how politically naive many celebrities of the time proved to be. As were intellectuals. Or useful idiots, as Lenin called them - who ignored or accepted, sometimes promoted, tyrannies and tyrants. He meets Gareth Jones' niece and Walter Duranty's biographer.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkvRoJmQbQg
Despite the best efforts of a number of historians, many aspects of the ferocious struggle between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union during the Second World War remain obscure or shrouded in myth. One of the most persistent of these is the notion—largely created by many former members of its own officer corps in the immediate postwar period—that the German Army was a paragon of military professionalism and operational proficiency whose defeat on the Eastern Front was solely attributable to the amateurish meddling of a crazed former Corporal and the overwhelming numerical superiority of the Red Army. A key pillar upon which the argument of German numerical-weakness vis-à-vis the Red Army has been constructed is the assertion that Germany was simply incapable of providing its army with the necessary quantities of men and equipment needed to replace its losses. In consequence, as their losses outstripped the availability of replacements, German field formations became progressively weaker until they were incapable of securing their objectives.