THE TIMES carries (Feb 15) a review by Carol Midgley headlined “Hitler, Stalin and a new look at how evil grows.”
Her review was okay. I saw the programme, which mixed genuine newsreel pictures with actors dressed up as Hitler, Stalin and others, and commentary by titled British spooks and other worthies. .
It appears to have been made for British commercial and propaganda reasons. I tumbled on a similarly created one on American Public Service TV, only to realise at the end that it was a BBC production and an interviw with Gorbachev on RT (Russian to find out at the end )that it, too, was a BBC production.
It was claimed that Stalin admired Hitler’s ruthless cruelty on the Night of The Long Knives, which apparently shocked the sensibility of one British commentator (whose name I will tell you at the end of this piece).
The BBC apparently doesn’t do irony for its founder, Lord Reith, according to Wikipedia, quoting his diaries, welcomed Hitler’s accession to power, praised his seizure of Czechoslovakia and particularly admired his slaughter of his former comrades on the Night of The Long Knives.
According to Richard Davenport- Hines in “An English Affair -Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo”, one of London Metropolitan Police’s most Senior Officers wrote just before Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, in a letter to a German friend that he regretted that he would be unable to
take up that friend’s offer to give him a conducted tour of the correctional facility at Dachau.
Five years earlier, on the Night of the Long Knives, his friend, following Hitler’s orders, had shot the Brownshirt leader Ernst Rohm dead.
I heard that on a previous BBC programme from the lips of the man appalled by Hitler’s cruelty and disregard for the value of human life.
They were the lips of Michael Jackson, once a dashing Captain in Ballymurphy and Derry,
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