CHANNEL FOUR AND WORLD WAR TWO by Donal Kennedy

I recently read William L Shirer’s 1400 page “RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH”  published in  1960. An American journalist, Shirer had been  a foreign correspondent in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Prague, Rome and Geneva between January 1934 and December 1940 and his “BERLIN DIARY” published in early 1941,gave first-hand, eye-witness and ear-witness accounts of developments in those years. His later work uses, amongst other things, captured German documents, to produce what will probably remain the most authoritative study of that horrific period.

Hitler and his circle were pitiless, lying, and fanatical scoundrels and it is hard  to find a single likeable thing about any of them. But they worked within a context which brought them to power in one of the most advanced, civilised nations on earth. Channel 4’s Documentary “THE RISE AND FALL OF HITLER” (May 13) could show perhaps a few hundred thousands of people cheering Hitler whilst a female commentator was describing him as the most hated man in history. No explanation of the apparent contradiction of the newsreel with the young lady’s comment was put forward. Hitler was not universally hated, for his accession to power in March 1933 was hailed/hailed by  an Editorial in THE IRISH TIMES, which some weeks earlier with confidence  instructed its readers not to return De Valera and Fianna Fáil to office.  Few of its readers would have considered voting for Fianna Fáil and, if any of them took issue with its praise of Hitler as Europe’s bulwark against “Muscovite Terror” the paper did not publish their opinions. THE IRISH TIMES was stoutly WEST BRITISH and respectable British opinion and calculating British statesmanship was virulently anti Soviet from 1917 until  1990.
In 1933 MI5 and MI6 officers in Berlin were handed files of Communists and other leftists, by the Gestapo, whilst some of the leftists were being tortured in the premises where they copied the files, which they were still adding to seventy years later. In July 1945 Churchill was planning to attack Russia and to use German troops in his Crusade.       The CHANNEL 4 documentary would have us believe the British and French “guarantee” to Poland was of some significance. In 1938 Chamberlain, who had never been in an aeroplane, twice flew to Germany to  approve Hitler’s takeover of Czech territory (a seizure shared by a predatory Polish government.) In March 1938 the Soviet Union called for an international conference to ensure that there be no more seizures . Some months later British diplomats took a slow boat to Russia ( I think it took 5 weeks) and showed little desire to use Soviet help. Hitler offered the Soviets a non-aggression pact.

The French and British promised to defend Poland and from September 1939 to May 1940 sat snugly behind the Maginot line until the Germans overran Western. Continental Europe and chased the British Army back across the Channel.  A year later Hitler could ignore the British and launch a gigantic attack on the Soviet Union, the power that bore the heaviest losses and yet destroyed the Third Reich.

Channel 4 did nothing to explain how Hitler and his cronies exploited the justifiable grievances of Germans at the Treaty of Versailles, nor how British governments, and French ones, connived at re-arming of Germany, Japanese seizure of Manchuria, the Italian rape of Abyssinia and Franco’s seizure of power in Spain, and made the world safe for Fascism for so long.