Search results for ""Author Norman Ridley""

On 9 November 1939, two unsuspecting British agents of the Special Intelligence Services walked into a trap set by German Spymaster Reinhard Heydrich. Believing that they were meeting a dissident German general for talks about helping German military opposition to bring down Hitler and end the war, they were instead taken captive in the Dutch village of Venlo and whisked away to Germany for interrogation by the Gestapo. The incident was a huge embarrassment for the Dutch government and provided the Germans with significant intelligence about SIS operations throughout Europe.The incident itself was an intelligence catastrophe but it also acts as a prism through which a number of other important narrative strands pass. Fundamental to the subterfuge perpetrated at Venlo were unsubstantiated but insistent rumours of high-ranking Germany generals plotting to overthrow the Nazi regime from within. After the humiliation suffered when Hitler tore up the Munich Agreement, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was anxious to see just how much truth there was in these stories; keen to rehabilitate his reputation through one last effort to find a peaceful rapprochement with Germany.When Franz Fischer, a small-time petty crook and agent provocateur, persuaded British SIS operatives in the Netherlands that he could act as a go-between for the British government with disaffected German generals, the German Security chief Reinhard Heydrich stepped in and quietly took control of the operation. Heydrich’s boss, head of the Gestapo Heinrich Himmler, was anxious to explore the possibility of peace negotiations with Britain and saw an opportunity to exploit the situation for his personal benefit.On the day before a crucial meeting of conspirators and British agents on the Dutch-German border, a bomb exploded in the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich in the exact spot where Hitler had stood to deliver a speech only minutes earlier. The perpetrator was quickly arrested, and Hitler demanded that Himmler find evidence to show that the two events were intimately connected—the British agents were snatched hours later.While the world was coming to terms with the fearsome power of German military might the British intelligence capability in northern Europe was consigned to the dustbin in the sleepy Dutch town of Venlo. This first full account of the Venlo incident explores the wider context of this German intelligence coup, and its consequences.

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War is a costly business and in 1939, Germany was almost broke with its economy overheating and heading for runaway inflation. Hitler needed hard foreign currency to pay for his war machine and the only way he could get this was by selling gold that he looted from the national banks of Austria, Czechoslovakia and all the countries that were occupied after September 1939. Another source of gold was the theft of personal gold especially from the Jews, most grotesquely, the haul of dental gold which came out of the concentration camps. No neutral country would accept Reichsmarks so the gold had to be laundered through Swiss banks. The story of Swiss complicity in German war crimes is still a subject of controversy, and lawsuits. There are also questions about the parts played by other countries, particularly Portugal, in laundering stolen gold for the Nazis. The Vatican's dealings with Hitler have often been seen as ambiguous and this book investigates the Holy See's role in helping ship Nazi gold to South America, and how that gold might have been used to re-create the German Reich. After the war a commission was set up to recover as much gold as possible and restore it to those from whom it was stolen. This, of course, was beset by huge problems especially with regards to gold that was looted from Holocaust victims. Enormous quantities of gold and other treasures were hidden in a mine at Merkers in Thuringia which was found by the US 3rd Army in 1945, but much gold remains unaccounted for, and attempts are still ongoing to uncover supposed hidden caches, the most recent in Poland where four tons are believed to have been found by the Silesian Bridge Foundation in May of 2022. The whereabouts and disposal of the remaining stolen gold has led to numerous investigations and countless conspiracy theories. In Hitler's Gold the author analyses these and uncovers many of the mysteries surrounding this continuing search for the missing millions.

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On 19 December 1938, Otto Hahn, working at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin, conducted an experiment the results of which baffled him. It took his migr collaborator Lise Meitner to explain that he had split an atom of uranium, which at the time seemed to defy all known laws of physics. When Neils Bohr took this news to the United States it became clear to scientists there that these results opened a completely new and, for some, horrifying possibility of energy production that could be used for both peaceful and military purposes. Scientists in Germany, France, Britain and the US began to delve deeper into the implications. But it was the British government that was the first to explicitly describe how the splitting of the atom might be utilised to create a practical weapon of fearsome power. France, by then, had been occupied by the Germans and most of their nuclear scientists had fled to Britain. For their part, the Germans, who for a time were at the very forefront of nuclear research, had weakened their own scientific ranks by hounding many of their best scientists who had fled persecution under the draconian Nazi racial laws. They still retained, however, possibly the ablest nuclear scientist of them all in Werner Heisenberg who set about developing his own programme for nuclear power. British scientists made extensive progress before realising that translating their laboratory results into the vast industrial enterprise required to build a bomb was way beyond the nation's stretched resources. The government agreed to hand over all the UK's research findings to America in return for a share of the spoils. The United States, for its part, was impressed with British results and invested enormous sums of money and resources into what became known as the Manhattan Project in a concerted effort to build a bomb before the end of the war. For much of the war the Soviets showed little enthusiasm for the sort of investment required to build their own bomb. However, with an eye to the future they established an extensive espionage network both in Britain and America. Following the German surrender there was still the problem of Japan, and the race continued to develop a working bomb to accelerate the end of the war, both to save Allied lives and to prevent Soviet expansion into northern China and the Japanese mainland. It was a race that the Unites States won. It was also a race that ushered in a new Cold War.

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From the chaos of the First World War, during which Germany and Russia had fought each other to a standstill, there emerged two societies whose diametrically opposed ideologies of communism and fascism represented the opposite extremes of the political spectrum. Despite this, in time the governments and military establishments in both countries were able to create an environment where political expediency led to both cooperation and an eventual alliance. Western democracies found both systems repellent but the two countries, Germany and the Soviet Union, embodied vast resources of, in the case of the Soviets, raw materials and, in the case of Germany, huge intellectual, scientific and industrial expertise. Both offered massive opportunities for trade, but neither made comfortable partners. Britain, whose sympathies lay more with the Germans, and France, whose history tied them more to Eastern Europe, tended to treat both Germany and the Soviet Union as outcast states. This created a great deal of animosity in return and ultimately drove the outcasts into each other's arms. Whilst animosity was rampant on a political level, both countries, now having equal pariah status in the eyes of the Western allies, began to see huge benefits in military and economic cooperation. Collaborative ventures for covert armament production and training facilities were initiated in 1921. These schemes would continue, with varying degrees of success, for more than a decade until the rise of Nazism in Germany put an end to it. The Spanish Civil War saw not only thee two rival political philosophies but opposing military doctrines also being tested against each other on the field of battle. It is remarkable, therefore, that these two nations emerged from this maelstrom to re-discover the spirit of Rapallo'. It was a spirit which culminated in the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in August 1939. Within weeks, both sides would display their unity as they fell together with ruthless efficiency upon the hapless Poland. This book looks at how these two strange bedfellows' dealt with western hostility and found ways to accommodate each other in a bid to recover from the economic devastation and dismantling of their historic territorial boundaries. The extent to which cooperation was achieved is unusual given the circumstances, especially as they had to contend with the machinations of the Western Powers. The era of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact proved to be a brief liaison, one that collapsed into savagery again when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa just a few months later.

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Almost since the advent of warfare, civilians have suffered collateral damage', but the concept of Total War - a war without limits - only surfaced in the early part of the twentieth century. The idea of huge numbers of aircraft raining death upon defenceless cities was seen by many as not only barbaric but, in practical terms, quite unrealistic given the logistical challenges that would have to be overcome in order to put them into practice. Any complacency over the threat, however, was rudely shattered on 26 February 1935, when Adolf Hitler officially signed a decree authorizing the formation of the Luftwaffe. The third branch of Germany's armed forces erupted on to the European military landscape. Its blustering claims of irrepressible air power sent waves of panic rippling through ministries of war throughout the world. Framing a realistic response to Hitler's propaganda offensive proved to be problematic given the lack of detailed knowledge of not only the numbers, but also the true performance capabilities of his new generation of aircraft and the ways in which they had expanded the boundaries of war. It was, therefore, of huge interest to all modern military establishments when these machines were deployed during the Spanish Civil War which broke out in July 1936. Notwithstanding the limited scope of this conflict, it offered, for the participating nations, a testing ground for new machines and, for the interested observers, a window into the future of aerial warfare. When the Spanish Civil War was less than a year old it had already seen air power employed in most of the ways that it would be used in the Second World War. This not only included airlifting troops, reconnaissance, interdiction, close support and strategic bombing, but also the deliberate targeting of civilians as a means of achieving military objectives. This book looks at all the significant aerial engagements of the war and examines them against the background of the wider global context. In this way, the Spanish Civil War's part in the evolution of air power is confirmed, as is the way in which its lessons were learned, or ignored, in the context of the much greater conflagration that was to come.

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The Battle of Britain was fought between two airborne military elites and was a classic example of pure attack against pure defence. Though it was essentially a 'war of attrition', it was an engagement in which the gathering, assessment and reaction to intelligence played a significant role on both sides. In some respects, both the RAF and the Luftwaffe were hamstrung in their endeavours during the Battle of Britain by poor intelligence. The most egregious Luftwaffe blunder was its failure to appreciate the true nature of Fighter Command's operational systems and consequently it made fundamental strategic errors when evaluating its plans to degrade them. This was compounded by the Luftwaffe's Intelligence chief, Major Josef 'Beppo' Schmid, whose consistent underestimation of Fighter Command's capabilities had a huge negative impact upon Reichsmarschall Goering's decision-making at all stages of the conflict. Both the Luftwaffe and the RAF lacked detailed information about each other's war production capacity. While the Luftwaffe did have the benefit of pre-war aerial surveillance data it had been unable to update it significantly since the declaration of war in September 1939. Fighter Command did have an distinct advantage through its radar surveillance systems, but this was, in the early stages of the conflict at least, less than totally reliable and it was often difficult to interpret the data coming through due to the inexperience of many of its operators. Another promising source of intelligence was the interception of Luftwaffe communications. It is clear that the Luftwaffe was unable to use intelligence as a 'force multiplier', by concentrating resources effectively, and actually fell into a negative spiral where poor intelligence acted as a 'force diluter', thus wasting resources in strategically questionable areas. The British, despite being essentially unable to predict enemy intentions, did have the means, however imperfect, to respond quickly and effectively to each new strategic initiative rolled out by the Luftwaffe. The result of three years intensive research, in this book the author analyses the way in which both the British and German Intelligence services played a part in the Battle of Britain, thereby attempting to throw light on an aspect of the battle that has been hitherto underexposed to scrutiny.

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In many countries around the world, the end of the First World War, far from leading to a new world order of stability, ushered in an area of uncertainty and economic decline. To solve the problems of unemployment, high inflation, low wages and poor working conditions, many turned to the political right for a solution to leaders such as Mussolini and Hitler. But it was not only in countries such as Italy and Germany that people saw fascism as an alternative to democracy. It is sometimes said fascism in America first manifested itself as a reaction by a native-born population to the surge in the numbers of European immigrants in 1830. It went on to find a voice at least another four times up to the outbreak of the Second World War, most obviously in the formation of the German American Bund. American politicians and commentators have traditionally avoided applying the label of fascist' to any movement, preferring instead to describe extreme right-wing groups as nativist', money-mak

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The First World War had seen the mechanisation of warfare. Battle fronts had become immobilised in the grip of machine-guns and heavy artillery, leading to slaughter on an unprecedented scale. The end of the war saw exhausted governments extricating themselves from the carnage, but some leaders were concerned that, sooner or later, another major war would follow. As France's Marshal Foch put it, the Treaty of Versailles was only a twenty-year truce'. The overriding concern was to find ways in future of avoiding the kind of static battle fronts that had consumed so many in such futile efforts. Military aviation was seen as the one great innovation that had the potential to do this by revolutionising warfare. It would not only augment the effectiveness of ground forces in a tactical role, but it also had the means of reaching out strategically beyond the battlefronts to strike at the enemy's trade, supplies, communications and industrial production. All through the war, military aviation had been firmly under the control of army commanders but there was soon a fierce debate over the way it should develop. The development of an air doctrine' within each of the major European powers was fraught with difficulty as the nascent air arms struggled, with varying degrees of success, to free themselves from army control to find a new, independent identity. This book examines the way in which these air arms competed for prominence within the military structures of six major European nations - Germany, Britain, France, Soviet Union, Poland and Italy - with different resources, ambitions and philosophies, in the years from the beginning of aviation right up to the start of the Second World War.

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Following the end of the First World War, the newly reformed state of Poland was wedged uncomfortably between the two dominant nations of Germany and the Soviet Union. With their diametrically opposed political philosophies, both of Poland’s neighbours plotted continuously to reclaim its lands that had up until recently been part of the once great but now defunct German and Russian empires. In order to protect itself, Poland was obliged to plot and negotiate with both of its neighbours to try and prevent them from realising their ambitions to eviscerate the country. The United States had been instrumental in the creation of the Polish state after the First World War, Wilson in particular stoking the Poles’ growing powerful nationalistic fervour. As Norman Ridley reveals, this was the beginning of a turbulent period for Poland. There was, for example, the dramatic and improbable ‘Miracle on the Vistula’ when Polish forces defeated the communist Red Army in 1920 – and in so doing halted the spread of communism across eastern Europe. As well as bitter ethnic battles between Germany and Poland for the political control of Upper Silesia, there were also the burning ambitions of Weimar Germany, and later Nazi Germany, to reclaim lands stripped from them and incorporated into the new state of Poland at Versailles. Despite America’s initial support after the war, the US thereafter showed little interest in Poland’s predicament. While France was a traditional friend to the Polish peoples, and a significant supplier of military aid, its political influence over eastern European affairs weakened as its own political institutions fell prey to extremes of both left and right and its immediate post-war dominance waned. Britain was interested only in commerce and that made Germany and Russia significantly more important as trading partners than the predominantly agricultural and technically backward state of Poland. Despite the dominance of right-wing politics in Poland, the emergence of Hitler and the Nazis in Germany did little to bring the countries together. This even drove them further apart as the Führer ramped up his rhetorical assault on the perceived injustices of Versailles, which were soon to translate into territorial expansion over Austria and Czechoslovakia. Poland was to be the next in line. Britain and France belatedly roused themselves to challenge the threat posed by Hitler and the Nazis. After the capitulation of the Anschluss and the humiliation of Munich, London and Paris found themselves in the disagreeable position of seeing no option but to throw their whole weight behind the integrity of the Polish state if they were ever going to make any sort of stand against Nazi aggression.

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During the Second World War, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were occupied on three separate occasions twice by the Soviet Union and once by Nazi Germany. The signing of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact of 1939 allowed the Soviets to dominate the Baltic states without fear of German reprisals, causing many in the German-Baltic populations to flee to Poland. Soviet rule of the Baltics was brutal with the purging of political elites and deportation of many tens of thousands in a bid to turn them into vassal states. Consequently, when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, many Balts saw it as a liberation from Soviet cruelties. The reality was, however, that it turned out to be the beginning of something much worse. During their occupation of Poland prior to Barbarossa the Nazis had decimated the Polish political elites, and the Jews there had been herded into ghettos in preparation for deportation to the east where they would serve as slave labour in the Nazi economy after the

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Following the end of the First World War, many countries experienced economic decline. Unemployment, high inflation, low wages and poor working conditions led to widespread unrest. This manifested itself in the rise of powerful militaristic leaders, first in Italy where fascism was born, and then in Germany and elsewhere. The policies of the likes of Mussolini and Hitler were hugely popular, and fascism was seen by many as a viable political alternative to democracy.To some degree, these ideals also gained traction in the UK where some individuals in and among the elite of British society believed fascism was the way forward for the country. This is fully explored in Hitler's British Nazis which traces the evolution of extreme right-wing opinion from the turn of the century right through to the end of the Second World War. In particular it looks at the way British fascism developed its own character due to Britain having been on the winning side during the First World War.Early fascist

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When the Nazis came to power in January 1933, they began a programme of transforming Germany from a democracy into a totalitarian state, but it was not a matter of simply enforcing compliance. The people had to be coaxed into believing in the new regime. Hearts and minds had to be won over and one of the ways the Nazis did that was to create an ideal of German nationhood in which everyone could feel proud. This was especially the case with art, which came to be used as a powerful tool of propaganda both to disseminate the myth amongst the population and indicate to the Nazi administrators the sort of cultural environment they should create. It was not an easy thing to do. While the nation was being re-created as a dynamic, modern, and powerful industrial giant, all the signals coming from Hitler indicated that his own idyllic view of the German nation was of a traditional, rural people deep-rooted in a romantic-mystical aesthetic. Hitler's own experience as an artist in Vienna befo

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Most strongly associated with Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, it is often stated that Britain's policy of appeasement was instituted in the 1930s in the hope of avoiding war with Hitler's Nazi Germany. At the time, appeasement was viewed by many as a popular and seemingly pragmatic policy. In this book the author sets out to show how appeasement was not a na ve attempt to secure a lasting peace by resolving German grievances, but a means of buying time for rearmament. By the middle of the 1930s, British policy was based on the presumption that the balance of power had already dramatically shifted in Germany's favour. It was felt that Britain, chiefly for economic reasons, was unable to restore the balance, and that extensive concessions to Germany would not satisfy Hitler, whose aggressive policies intensified the already high risk of war.. The only realistic option, and one that was clearly adopted by Neville Chamberlain, was to try to influence the timing of the inevitable military confrontation and, in the meantime, pursue a steady and economically sustainable programme of rearmament. Appeasement would buy' that time for the British government. Crucially this strategy required continuously updated and accurate information about the strength, current and future, of the German armed forces, especially the Luftwaffe, and an understanding of their military strategy. Piercing the Nazis' veil of secrecy was vital if the intelligence services were to build up a true picture of the extent of German rearmament and the purposes to which it might be put. The many agents, codebreakers, and counter-espionage personnel played a vital role in maximising the benefits that appeasement provided - even as war clouds continued to gather. These individuals were increasingly handed greater responsibility in a bid to inform British statesmen now scrambling to prepare for a catastrophic confrontation with Germany. In Reading Hitler's Mind, Norman Ridley reveals the remarkable efforts made by the tiny, underfunded and often side-lined British intelligence services as they sought to inform those whose role it was to make decisions upon which the wheels of history turned.

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