Photo: The Berlin Wall comes down, 1989 670 words / 3 minute read 1909: Official figures released in St Petersburg in 1909 revealed that 782 political offenders had been executed in the previous year, an increase of more than a hundred from the year before that. The number in exile…
Photo: Martin, speaking at Hillsdale College 2950 words/15 minute read It is an honour to be asked to speak today, at the first Yossi Harel annual lecture. I thank Sir Ronald Cohen for inviting me to reflect on political leadership from an historical perspective. I have been fortunate to have had…
Photo: Crematorium IV at Birkenau, shortly before it was ready to be put into operation in the spring of 1943. Photo from Auschwitz and the Allies 700 words/3 minute read At Birkenau the Jews of the Sonderkommando were preparing to revolt. It was an enterprise of supreme hazard, and of supreme…
Photo: Polish prisoners-of-war, captured by the Germans in September 1939. 1530 words/8 minute read The Second World War, the first phase of which broke out on 1 September 1939 when Germany attacked Poland, had its origins twenty-one years earlier, when the First World War – then known as the Great War…
Churchill & Poland speech excerpt 3 minute read /646 words When, in…
Photo: Vera Brittain Étaples, France, November 2005 1.30 minute read/ 326 words Along with reading wall plaques and war memorials, Martin also believed in visiting war cemeteries in whatever region or country he found himself. One of the more powerful and overwhelming is that of the Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery…
Photo: Roosevelt and Churchill, August 1941 As part of the Franco-German Armistice, France had agreed to transfer its warships to German control. Part of that fleet was at Oran, in French North Africa. When Lothian asked Roosevelt if he would support Britain’s “forcible seizure” of the ships, Roosevelt replied, “certainly.”…
Photo: Sir Martin on the beach at Normandy, describing the invasion, May 2003. Photo © Bernie Pucker, with thanks to Liz Burgess. The Allied landing in 1944 might have ended in disaster. Winston Churchill thought he would be woken up to be told of massive casualties. General Eisenhower prepared a…
Photo: David Ben-Gurion declaring Israeli independence, with a photo of Theodor Herzl above him. Israel’s Declaration of Independence read out by David Ben Gurion, Tel Aviv, 14 May 1948 The Jewish people came into being in Eretz Israel [the Land of Israel]. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was…
Photo: Venetia Stanley, 1887-1948 1971, Martin, just back in Oxford from a visit to Gallipoli to research Churchill’s time there for Volume III of the biography, writes: Shortly after my return to Britain, with the image of the Dardanelles still vivid in my mind I received a visitor. She was…
Photo: BUDAPEST MAP From The Righteous 1941 June 27: Hungary enters the war on the side of Germany. August: Hungary agrees to German request for 20,000 Jewish forced labourers in German-occupied Russia. More than 15,000 are killed, 11,000 at Kamenets Podolsk on 23 August 1941. 1943 April 17: The Hungarian…
Photo: Churchill addressing the crew of the HMS Exeter Notwithstanding the heroic efforts of the Royal Air Force in repelling the German air assault throughout the summer and autumn of 1940, the British public, after the fierce battering of the Blitz, remained deeply anxious lest Hitler, having subjugated Denmark and…
Photo: Sir Ben Helfgott, knighted for Services to Holocaust Remembrance and Education Fifteen-year-old Ben Helfgott from Piotrkow, who had also been brought from Schlieben, later recalled: “Two weeks after reaching the camp I learned that my father had been killed only a few days before, trying to run away from…
PHOTO: Adolph Hitler salutes, while two SS men hold back an excited crowd. Circa 1932, Fox Photos Ltd August 1932: … as part of the research for his Marlborough biography, Churchill left England for Germany, and for a visit to the battlefields of Blenheim. With him on this expedition went…
Photo: The revamped Metropole Hotel, which had been requisitioned during both the First and Second World Wars as the Metropole Building, redone in 2007 as the Corinthia Hotel, Northumberland Avenue, London Note: While preparing a “Churchill-lite” tour of London for a former Hillsdale Churchill Fellow, Lillian Quinones, I found this…
I was born on 25 October 1936, three weeks after the Battle of Cable Street, and therefore have no recollections of it. I have prepared an account of it from contemporary documents, the newspapers of the time, and the recollections of some of those who took part in it for…
Photo: Jack Brauns, Martin, Avraham Tory, in Israel, 1980s (Jack Brauns, a survivor of Kovno, was the son of Dr Moshe Brauns, Director of the Jewish Hospital and Head of Infectious Diseases in the Ghetto) Like all the captive peoples – Poles, Czechs, Serbs, Greeks, Dutch, Danes, and many more…
A vital part of the success of the RAF was played by Bomber Command. Sir Martin was involved in an attempt to see those who took part in Bomber Command awarded with a campaign medal, an honour that has still sadly eluded them. In 2008 he wrote this dedication: My…
On Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, Winston Churchill was Minister of Munitions. As Big Ben struck 11, and the guns fell silent on the Western Front, he was looking out of his ministerial window over Northumberland Avenue. The broad street was deserted. Suddenly, as he wrote, he saw “the slight…
Photo: Winston Churchill with his son Randolph and daughter Mary at an American military cemetery near Namur, 15th July 1946, from Churchill, A Life. 6 June 1968 found Sir Martin on the beach in Portugal where he received word that his former boss Randolph Churchill, Sir Winston’s son, had died. Martin…