In 1962 Sir Martin spent the summer driving through the United States, returning in 1965 as a visiting scholar at the University of South Carolina. It was during these early visits that he developed a love for American history and geography in all their aspects. His Routledge Atlas of American History…
In 2006, Martin, who had been appointed a Distinguished Fellow at Hillsdale College in Michigan, was there speaking on “What Did Democracy Mean to Winston Churchill”. After his lecture, I made my way up to him. The moment he spotted me, he called out to me and turned to a gentleman standing next…
Journal of the British Politics Society, Norway British Politics Review,Volume 4, No. 4, Autumn 2009 ©Martin Gilbert I have made a close study during my Churchill work of the low points and high points of his war leadership. In this article, I have chosen seven, between May and December 1940.…
©Martin Gilbert, 2009 First Published in The Observer There can have been few more skilful cover-ups in British history than the story of the British Government’s efforts to force the Poles to give up territory to Germany on the very eve of the Second World War. When Neville Chamberlain, who…
In January 2001, Martin and I spent several chilly days trudging through a snowy Budapest. We visited the sites of the 1943-44 period of German occupation and the hiding places and diplomatically-protected safe houses for Jews that provided refuge, first from the Germans, and then from their Hungarian Arrow Cross…
Eighty years have passed since the Serbian nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, shot and killed the heir to the Hapsburgs in Sarajevo in June 1914, precipitating four years of war. In terms of the lives of soldiers lost it was the most costly war of modern times: nine million military dead. In…
Tuesday, 21 June, 2016 Sir Martin Gilbert was a scholar and historian, who wrote extensively on the Holocaust. This blog was written for HMDT by Lady Gilbert, the creator and editor of three volumes of Holocaust Memoir Digest, based on published survivor memoirs, who was married to Sir Martin Gilbert during…
Foreword to Major & Mrs Holt’s Battlefield Guide to the Somme 2008 edition by Sir Martin Gilbert,17 December 2007 Reprinted by kind permission of Major & Mrs Holt Major and Mrs Holt continue to do an important service to everyone interested in the battlefields of the First and Second World…
Oysters were the secret weapon with which Hitler might have triumphed on D-Day. Not the succulent variety to be eaten on the half-shell, but a devastating mine — code-named Oyster by the Allies — that could not be sunk: an unscupperable mine that revealed a German technology far more advanced…
For the first half of this century, during one of the longest active political careers in this country, Winston Churchill was interested and sympathetic to Zionism. Hating tyranny in all its forms, he had reacted strongly against the Tzarist pogroms in the first years of the century and always understood…
The two escapees were determined to alert the outside world to the reality of Auschwitz, and to the fate that seemed to be in store for the Jews of Hungary. Wetzler, who was twenty-six, had been an actual witness of the destruction of the Theresienstadt family camp. Vrba was nineteen…
Among his many trips to Poland, the first as a university student in 1959, the last in 2011, was this August 1980 visit to the former Jewish cities, towns and villages, to the mass murder sites and death camps to which the Jews of Europe were taken to be murdered,…
The First Crosby Kemper Lecture, delivered by Sir Martin Gilbert at the Winston Churchill Memorial, Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri , April 26, 1981. President Saunders, ladies and gentlemen, I am deeply honoured to be invited here to Westminster College to talk at the site of Churchill’s famous ‘Iron Curtain Speech,’ and…
Picture: Randolph Churchill, Stour, East Bergholt, February 1965 My employment with Randolph Churchill began in October 1962, on my twenty-sixth birthday. Given Randolph’s reputation for drink and anger, my friends and I assumed that my engagement would be of short duration. I was still there, as part of his team…
Speech given at the India International Centre, Delhi: 3 June 2002 I first came to this great city in 1958 forty-four years ago, and was present when Jawaharlal Nehru spoke at the Red Fort on the eleventh anniversary of Indian Independence – to a crowd estimated at one million. In…
Yitzhak Rabin and John Major during a reception ceremony in Jerusalem’s Rose Garden Credit: National Photo Collection; Photo by Sa’ar Ya’acov, 12/03/1995 By Martin Gilbert It was my good fortune to have met Yitzhak Rabin a number of times during the last twenty years of his cruelly truncated life. Our…
You may have noticed … different spellings for Hanukah. Gloria Donen Sosin, an American correspondent of mine, has just sent me an article in which she notes no less than eighteen different spellings – in English transliteration alone – of the five Hebrew letters that make up the name of…
In 2006, when Martin’s book Kristallnacht came out, he was invited to a party to celebrate the book and to launch it on its way. The party was held at the Residence of the German Ambassador in London, and our host was the German Chargé d’Affaires, Hans-Henning Blomeyer-Bartenstein. Martin brought…
“Kristallnacht taught several lessons. It taught those who were the source of prejudice that a whole people can be demonised; that a whole nation can be turned totally and obscenely against a decent, hard-working, creative, loyal and integral part of its own society. This point was made on 19 August…
Extracts from Sir Martin’s unpublished diary Coming to Israel on 4 October 1973 to research Churchill’s 1921 visit there, Sir Martin was caught up in the conflict as a volunteer, and keen to record history as it happened: 5.30 am. Give a lift to an Englishman trying to get to…