History of England 1-6

In the spring of 1944, Churchill announced the number of casualties so far: 120,958. A report from the Reich noted, ‘in this uneasy period of invasion and retribution … The people of Germany are beginning to long for peace.’ British intelligence had now, by virtue of Ultra, discovered the position and size of all German military formations. It is one of the great mysteries of the war that the Germans did not suspect some secret military intelligence. The Allies were on the verge of a cross-Channel invasion of northern Europe, and Goebbels felt obliged to write that ‘Germany must be made more desolate than the Sahara.’ It came from the depths of despair, but it also evoked Hitler’s belief that if Germany was defeated, it did not deserve to survive.

The ending had come. On the evening of 5 June, the Allied flotilla approached the beaches of Normandy. Hitler had ordered that the aim should be to repulse the enemy and send them ‘back into the sea’, but it was as futile as Canute’s order to the waves. By midnight, more than 50,000 Allied combatants were on French soil. By 25 August, the general commander of Paris, General von Choltitz, had surrendered, to be triumphantly replaced by General Koenig. Yet it was not members of his group who liberated Paris, but the legions of the free Spanish. A German general who visited Hitler reported that ‘it was a tired, broken man who greeted me, who shuffled onto a chair, his shoulders drooping, and asked me to sit down … He spoke so softly and so hesitantly, it was hard to understand him. His hands trembled so much he had to grip them between his knees.’

By February 1945, Berlin was deemed to be a fortress city in the charge of the Germans, but a further gesture was needed. This was the American and British attack upon Dresden from the air. The rocket scientists nurtured by Hitler fled for haven. As the Russian soldiers closed in on Berlin, the Nazi leaders made their final preparations. Their fates are well known. Hitler shot himself in the mouth, while his wife swallowed poison. Their bodies were soaked in petrol and enveloped in fire. Goebbels and his wife, loyal to the last, died with him, making sure to kill their children first. The justification for this was given by Goebbels’s wife in her last letter to the world: ‘everything beautiful’, she wrote, ‘is about to be destroyed.’

Their allies in militant nationalism fled such a fate, only to be outrun by justice. Mussolini and his mistress were shot and suspended by their legs in a market square. Vidkun Quisling, ‘minister president’ of Norway, whose name would become a byword for collaboration, was shot in October 1945, still proclaiming that he had had his nation’s best interests at heart. In Slovakia, Jozef Tiso, the priest turned Fascist dictator, was caught and hanged in 1947. Ion Antonescu, the Romanian ‘conducatore’, was executed in 1946. Hungary’s Ferenc Szálasi, the brutal mummy’s boy of ‘Hungarism’, was executed in the same year. Only Ante Pavelić, the head of the infamous ‘Ustashe’, the Croatian separatist movement whose cruelty had shocked even the Nazis, managed to evade justice. He found a sympathetic host in Juan Perón of Argentina, who also welcomed a remarkable number of fugitive Germans. Regarding the war in Europe, the last word belongs to its victims. One of the inmates of Buchenwald, snatched from death at the last hour, wrote that ‘you were our liberators, but we, the diseased, the emaciated, barely human survivors, were your teachers. We taught you to understand the Kingdom of the Night.’

In Britain, the celebrations that had greeted the end of the First World War were muted, even sombre, when compared with the geyser of joy that burst forth on VE day. In no previous war had the English civilian been made to feel the force of the conflict so intimately or relentlessly. The notion of the ‘home front’ would have been almost inexplicable to a previous generation. Londoners had faced obliteration once every thirty-six hours for over five years, threatened at their work, having their meals, putting their children to bed, and going about the ordinary business of their lives. It had been a time when the ‘moral economy’ of war had been complicated, at times even reversed. If the soldier had suffered and died as a combatant, so too had the civilian.

But there was to be a moral inventory for the Allies to complete. The names of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would not be forgotten, and nor would that of Dresden. Closer to home, the Channel Islands had been liberated from the Germans, but the tale there is not wholly comforting. A photograph from that occupation shows a German officer and a British ‘bobby’ chatting amicably by a roadside. It may be that this image was taken for propaganda purposes, but it seems unlikely. Either way, it serves as a sobering corrective: Britain could afford a sense of triumph and relief, but not of complacency or self-indulgence.