HistoryExtra https://www.historyextra.com/people/adolf-hitler Sun, 27 Sep 2026 19:56:01 GMT en hourly 1 Hitler ordered my father’s death – but an SS general spared his life https://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/george-lascelles-harewood-gottlob-berger-colditz-ww2/ Sun, 27 Sep 2026 20:00:06 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/george-lascelles-harewood-gottlob-berger-colditz-ww2/ When he was captured by the Nazis in 1944, George Lascelles – the eldest nephew of King George VI – became one of Colditz Castle’s most important prisoners. David Lascelles tells the remarkable story behind his father’s time in captivity, and why, decades later, he decided to track down a pistol belonging to the man who let his father walk free It was April 1945. As the Second World War entered its final stages, my father, First Lieutenant George Lascelles of the Grenadier Guards, was imprisoned in Oflag IV-C, Colditz Castle.

The prisoners there called it a straflager – a punishment camp – much to the irritation of their German captors, who insisted it was just an ordinary PoW camp but with better security. It was where they sent particularly troublesome prisoners, the habitual escapers and those considered to be deutschfeindlich, hostile to German ways.

My father, just 22 years old, didn’t see himself as any of those. He had been a prisoner for less than a year and had never tried to escape. What he was, though, was well connected. His maternal uncle was King George VI, and he was one of a small group of young British officers being held together in Colditz, all of them related to members of the establishment: the son of the Viceroy of India, the nephew of Clementine Churchill, and so on.

The Germans called them the ‘Prominente’. They were hostages, kept together for who knows what purpose when the war ended: perhaps as bargaining chips for captured high-ranking Nazis, or as human shields in Hitler’s rumoured last redoubt in the mountains of southern Germany.

For the other prisoners in Colditz, the sound of the Allied guns was the sound of approaching freedom. For the Prominente, it signalled the moment of maximum danger. Sure enough, just a couple of days before the Americans liberated Colditz, they were roused from their beds in the middle of the night, loaded onto a bus and driven south, destination unknown.

Fear and uncertainty

The Prominente were on the road for more than two weeks. It was a time of fear and uncertainty. They never knew where they were going to be the next day or whether that day might be their last.

After being transported to another medieval castle prison in the town of Tittmoning, they encountered a Dutch officer who had a plan that might buy them a little time – time, they hoped, for the approaching Allied armies to arrive.

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A small chamber had been excavated in the thick castle walls, in which five of the men could hide. A sixth, Giles Romilly, would escape with one of the Dutch prisoners in a pre-arranged plan. Hopefully the Germans would think they had all escaped.

It almost worked. It was four days before they were discovered, and Romilly and his Dutch companion made it all the way to Munich, arriving there a matter of days before the Americans liberated the city.

The Prominente were watched even more closely after this, with their guards now Waffen-SS rather than regular soldiers. So when they were moved to a run-down camp just outside the alpine town of Markt Pongau, they thought it was a concentration camp and that this was to be their end.

After a couple of days at the new site, they received an unexpected visitor: Obergruppenführer Gottlob Berger, the SS general recently appointed as Germany’s head of prisoner-of-war affairs. He showed them a letter from Hitler. It contained a list of their names, ranks and PoW numbers, with a short note attached: “On no account must the listed prisoners be allowed to fall into Allied hands.” It was their death warrant.

Berger had other ideas, however. The order was pointless and certainly illegal, he told them, and he – for the first time in his long military career – was not going to obey it. Instead, he was going to arrange their safe passage to the Allied front line, only a few hours’ drive away.

“I ask for nothing in return,” he added, “except that you remember this moment when the war is over.” And he presented the most senior member of the group, John Elphinstone, with a gift: an ornamental pistol in a red leather case. “This is,” he said, “of my goodwill the proof.”

Years later, Michael Alexander – one of the other Prominente and the cousin of a senior British general – described the moment in vivid detail:

“In the box, resplendent on a couch of red velvet, lay an enormous automatic pistol about the same size as a Colt .45. This splendidly flashy weapon was inlaid with ivory and enamel; its squat barrel was elaborately chased with golden oak-leaves in high relief. On the butt was the enamelled monogram of the SS and a small plate with Berger’s signature.”

Within days, the Prominente were home. Berger, on the other hand, was arrested, interrogated and tried as a war criminal at Nuremberg. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison, and his lawyer asked Elphinstone to write to the appeals court on behalf of the Prominente, explaining what Berger had done for them.

This affidavit was an important factor in Berger’s sentence being heavily reduced. Twenty-five years became 10 and, with further time off for good behaviour, he was released by the end of 1951.

Berger then settled in the small town of Gerstetten in southwest Germany, where his wife, two children and two grandchildren were living. He died there in 1975, still connected to many figures on the far right and still bitter at his treatment by the Allies. He said he regretted ever having trusted his long-time boss, Heinrich Himmler.

But why had he decided to spare the lives of my father and his fellow Prominente? Remorse? A belated onset of compassion? Or simply self-interest?

After Colditz

The Prominente returned to their old lives, or at least a version of them. My father was the youngest of the group, still at school when the war began, and just 22 when he returned to England. The next six years – 1945–51, when Berger was in prison – were perhaps the most tumultuous of his life.

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After leaving the army, he served as an aide to the governor general of Canada before graduating from Cambridge and getting a job in the business about which he was most passionate – music, especially opera.

His father died in 1947, and he inherited the family title, becoming the 7th Earl of Harewood. By the end of 1949 he was married, and his first child was born in 1950. That’s me.

The return home was not so straightforward for all the other Prominente. Some of the men almost certainly suffered from what would now be called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), though the condition wasn’t recognised then. “Pull yourself together and get on with it,” they would have been told.

Dawyck Haig, for example, son of Field Marshal Douglas Haig, the commander-in-chief of the British Expeditionary Force during the First World War, wrote in his memoirs that he had “a sort of breakdown”.

Giles Romilly, who had escaped from Tittmoning, was also haunted by his wartime experiences. “My five years of absence were like a deep shaft,” he wrote. “I at the bottom, able to see the free people overhead, not able to make them see or hear me.” He died of an overdose of barbiturates in California in 1967.

Michael Alexander, meanwhile, led a colourful postwar life in London, entertaining fellow members of what became known as the Chelsea Set in his flat in Eaton Square and at his restaurant just off the King’s Road.

The hunt for the pistol

Years later, I met several other descendants of the Prominente. There was one question that I asked each of them: did they know what had become of Berger’s pistol?

I had been intrigued by it from the moment I started working on my new book, Out of Colditz. It seemed like a classic MacGuffin – a plot device in a movie that helps drive the story but is otherwise unimportant to the audience (the Maltese Falcon, for example). The story of Berger and the Prominente would have been much the same without the pistol, but the weapon seemed to embody the theatricality of their brief, strange encounter.

Berger had presented the pistol to John Elphinstone, so I set out to learn more about him. Elphinstone was a countryman, a fisherman and a keen shot. After the war, he returned to manage the family estate in Scotland. I assume he took the pistol home with him, though I could find no evidence of this or of what happened to it next.

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Its last known sighting was on the popular TV programme This is Your Life in 1985, when my father was the subject and Michael Alexander – a guest on the show along with a couple of the other Prominente – produced it from his pocket with a theatrical flourish. “Do you remember this, George?” he asked.

Elphinstone had died in 1975, so Alexander seemed to me to be the most likely holder of the gun. However, Alexander had died without leaving a will, and his friends had no idea of the weapon’s whereabouts. It was another dead end.

So if Alexander or his descendants didn’t have the pistol, who did? Elphinstone’s family seemed the most likely. He never married, so the title, the estate and the contents of the family home passed to his nephew, Jamie. Jamie married Willa Chetwode shortly after inheriting, and they had four children together before Jamie died in 1994, aged just 41.

Willa was left rattling around with four young children in a large house that held unhappy memories for her. Within a year she had sold the house, moved out and put its contents into storage. There it all remained, untouched, until a fire at the storage unit destroyed much of it. Did that include the pistol, I wondered?

When I finally tracked down Willa, who had since remarried, I asked her whether she had any idea where the pistol was. “Oh yes,” she replied. “I know exactly where it is. I’ve got it here in my safe.”

A special weapon with a strange history

I drove to meet Willa and her husband Thomas Lloyd at their home in west Wales, getting hopelessly lost in the narrow lanes around their house and arriving late, hot and flustered. “Don’t worry about that,” said Willa. “I expect you want to see the pistol.”

Thomas held up a red leather case. He clicked open the brass catches on the lid. It was, in its own small way, a dramatic moment. The lining of the box was a faded yellow, not the red that Michael Alexander had described. The case was a little battered, the engraved brass barrel quite tarnished and the ivory handle discoloured, but the Nazi eagle, swastika, SS insignia and Berger’s signature were very much as originally stated.

I lifted the pistol carefully out of the case. It was smaller than I had expected, settling easily into my palm, but heavier too. I checked the safety catch and the trigger. Both were jammed solid – hardly surprising, as it hadn’t been handled for a long time and had probably never been fired.

There was something almost comically theatrical about the way it had been presented, but the SS insignia and the swastika gave it a sinister edge. As often happens if you’ve been looking for something for a long time, the moment of discovery can be an anti-climax, but there was a tickle of emotion there, too, as I tried to picture the strange scene when the presentation was made.

“Wow!” I said, rather feebly. “So it really does exist.” Willa smiled ruefully. “Yes. It’s been sitting there all this time, and I’ve never known what to do with it.”

We talked about what might happen next. We agreed that a museum, probably the Imperial War Museum, would be the pistol’s best destination. It would be a permanent home for this “splendidly flashy” weapon, as Michael Alexander described it – a special weapon with a strange history.

As I write, Elphinstone’s family and the Imperial War Museum are currently in discussions. There could be no more suitable home for a weapon that, to me, has come to represent the extraordinary encounter between Berger and the Prominente, and its enduring impact on the lives of all concerned.

David Lascelles, 8th Earl of Harewood, is a BAFTA-winning film and television producer. He is the author of Out of Colditz: My Father the POW and the Nazi Who Controlled His Fate (Profile Books, 2026)

]]> Did Hitler escape from his bunker and live in Argentina after WW2? The real history that debunks the conspiracy https://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/did-hitler-escape-bunker-survive-argentina-south-america-conspiracy-real-history-facts/ Wed, 15 Jul 2026 10:32:54 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/did-hitler-escape-bunker-survive-argentina-south-america-conspiracy-real-history-facts/ Did Adolf Hitler kill himself at the end of the Second World War, or did he actually escape and flee to South America? That question has enthralled conspiracy theorists for decades, and is the subject of the first episode of our podcast series Conspiracy. Rob Attar spoke to Professor Richard J Evans about the origins of the theory and why it needs to be debunked once and for all On 30 April 1945, as Allied forces closed in on Berlin from both east and west, Adolf Hitler went into his private study in the underground Führerbunker and shot himself in the right temple. An all-or-nothing gambler, he had always said that he would accept only total victory in the Second World War or total defeat; as his supposed 1,000-year Third Reich collapsed around him, he declared multiple times his intention to commit suicide rather than be captured.

His wife of one day, Eva Braun, also took her own life – by ingesting cyanide – before their bodies were taken up to the garden of the Reich Chancellery, doused with petrol and burned. By the time the Soviet Red Army arrived a couple of days later, almost nothing remained of Hitler's body other than parts of the jawbone and some teeth, from which his identity could be confirmed.

The conspiracy theory: the escape of Hitler

However, some writers and journalists claim that, instead of killing himself upon realising the war was lost, Hitler managed to escape the bunker with Eva Braun, fled Germany and eventually made it to South America. In Argentina, he lived out the rest of his life under a new identity.

That is but one of the many sensational theories surrounding the fate of the Führer. Another suggests that he had been substituted in the bunker by a double (as had Braun and even his pet dog, Blondi), while another claims that Hitler lived for many years in a different underground bunker under the snow and ice of Antarctica.

Historical conspiracies

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What is the source of the theory?

The Soviets captured Berlin on 2 May 1945 and a Red Army report confirmed that Hitler was dead, based on the discovery of the remains in the Reich Chancellery garden and the testimonies of people who had been in the bunker in the last days of the war. This report, however, was suppressed by the Soviet leader Josef Stalin in an attempt to stay one step ahead of the other Allied nations.

“Stalin decided he wanted to sow confusion amongst the Western allies, so he started to hint strongly that Hitler had survived,” says Sir Richard J Evans, a leading expert on Nazi Germany and author of The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination (Allen Lane, 2020), speaking on a Conspiracy episode of the HistoryExtra podcast.

So almost immediately after the war, Soviet disinformation spread the idea that laid the foundations of the conspiracy theory. There were reports that Hitler had been spotted in venues located all over the world, from a café in Austria to Indonesia, and doctored mugshots were printed in newspapers in many countries. “There was even an unfortunate German who was interviewed many times by the police because he rather looked like Hitler,” says Professor Evans.

The specific claim that he ended up in Argentina was rooted in the fact that some Nazis did indeed escape there after the war. Stories emerged, based on zero corroborative evidence, including of one elderly Argentinian woman named Catalina Gomera, who worked in a house where a mysterious German man came to stay. She was not allowed to see him, but was told he was Hitler and she had to leave typical German meals of Wiener Schnitzel, Wurst and sausages outside his room. But Hitler, of course, was an uncompromising vegetarian.

Why do some people believe that Hitler survived?

The disinformation instigated by the Soviets convinced enough people that Hitler was alive. While top Nazi officers, like Goebbels and Himmler, had all killed themselves or been arrested, where they faced trial at Nuremberg, some lower-ranked personnel did manage to escape from Germany. Adolf Eichmann, the man in charge of implementing the Final Solution, and Josef Mengele, the so-called ‘Angel of Death’ and doctor at Auschwitz, both found their way to Argentina, while the Treblinka death camp Kommandant Franz Stangl escaped to Brazil.

Of course, a figure as well-known and instantly recognizable as Hitler would have been a different matter, but when claims that he had been spotted were sent to it, the US Central Intelligence Agency in the US was obliged to investigate, further giving credence to the conspiracy theory. That was despite, says Professor Evans, the CIA concluding “unambiguously” that each claim was “phoney and false”.

As for the persistence of the theory, Professor Evans highlights another key motivation: admiration. “He’d fooled the Allies so many times previously, he must have fooled them again, was the belief. He couldn’t possibly have died, such a great man as he was, by shooting himself in a squalid suicide pact underneath the ground. He must’ve escaped.”

Undeniably, there is a connection between the conspiracy and neo-Nazism. But as late as the 1950s and 60s, some people also wanted to believe Hitler lived so that he could be tracked down and brought to justice for the atrocities committed in the war. A “kind of wish-fulfilment”, as Professor Evans puts it.

The claims and hearsay, the grainy photographs, and the desire to believe in the theory continued over the years. From 2015 to 2018, a television series titled Hunting Hitler ran on the History Channel, in which investigators travelled across South America looking for any trace of the Führer. Unsurprisingly, they failed to find any.

What's the evidence that debunks the conspiracy?

From the days immediately following Hitler’s suicide, the evidence has been conclusive: both the forensic examination of the remains and interviews with Hitler’s adjutant Otto Günsche and assistants, like his valet Heinz Linge. Their testimonies featured in a Red Army report on Hitler's death, but after Stalin’s suppression this ultimately remained secret until the fall of the Soviet Union.

• Read more | Did Adolf Hitler really only have one testicle?

Other witnesses also spoke to Hugh Trevor Roper, the historian sent by British intelligence to investigate what happened in the bunker. His report, confirming that Hitler killed himself, was published in 1947, followed by his book, The Last Days of Hitler, the next year. The third piece of evidence, says Professor Evans, was a “thorough report compiled by legal authorities in Bavaria” in the 1950s in order to issue a death certificate for Hitler. This was necessary to “establish a legal basis for the return of some looted art that he had in his possession”.

It is worth considering the personalities of the main people involved too. Eva Braun, a professional photographer, took lots of photos and home movies before and during the war, but not a single thing emerged after the war's end, which seems unlikely if she had survived. Then there is Hitler himself, a political figure to the core, says Professor Evans. “He would have been plotting a comeback. He would not, as the conspiracy theorists suggest, have sat in quiet retirement, enjoying cups of tea and cake.”

Richard J Evans is a historian whose latest book, The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination (2020), is published by Allen Lane, 2020. Listen to the full episode, in which Richard J Evans considers the idea that the Nazi leader escaped and led a long life in South America

]]> "Weimar's citizens cheered on Hitler": why the home of German democracy was easy prey for the Nazis https://www.historyextra.com/membership/weimars-citizens-cheered-on-hitler-why-the-home-of-german-democracy-was-easy-prey-for-the-nazis/ Wed, 08 Jul 2026 13:56:39 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/weimars-citizens-cheered-on-hitler-why-the-home-of-german-democracy-was-easy-prey-for-the-nazis/ In the 1920s and 1930s, Weimar was rife with contradictions, embracing both utopian modernism and Nazism. This German town’s interwar story, says Katja Hoyer, reveals how democratic dreams can die in the face of economic ills and polarising politics Adolf Hitler could not have been clearer. “I love Weimar,” he proclaimed at the end of 1925. He wasn’t talking about the Weimar Republic that had emerged from Germany’s defeat at the end of the First World War, but about the town that lent the ill-fated democracy its name.

Weimar lies in the heart of Germany, about halfway between Hamburg and Munich. It is a quaint place, conscious of history and tradition, both of which it has in abundance. Its cobbled streets are lined with timber-framed houses, elegant villas, churches and palaces – all embraced by vast, beautifully landscaped gardens. It’s this combination of cosy charm and cultural importance that made the town so attractive to Hitler. And he was far from the only one drawn to Weimar.

Between the two world wars, Weimar was a place where people dreamed big ideas, ranging from liberal democracy and utopian art to eugenics and a form of tyranny that would plunge Europe into conflict. Weimar was where the architects of the Bauhaus movement first experimented with new ways of living, but also where Buchenwald – the largest concentration camp on German soil – was established in a beech forest nearby. This uncomfortable proximity of idealism and barbarism makes interwar Weimar the perfect place to seek answers to one of the greatest questions of the 20th century: how did a nation that prided itself on its culture and civility enable the catastrophe of Nazism?

Today, few people outside Germany could point to the town on a map. Yet its name widely conjures powerful notions of noble experiments and fallen ideals. That’s because it was the cradle of Germany’s first full democracy. The Weimar Republic burned brightly, but endured for little over 14 years, from 1919 to 1933 – its demise sealed when Hindenburg appointed Hitler as chancellor.

The shock of the new

To understand how Weimar rose to such prominence, we need to look first at 1918, when Germany lost not just the First World War but also its monarchy. Kaiser Wilhelm II was forced to abdicate and the country became a republic, requiring a new constitution. Berlin, which had been the capital of Prussia and the German empire, remained capital of the new Germany, but would not be where its administration was set up. For one thing, Berlin wasn’t safe. At the beginning of 1919, when the country held its first-ever fully democratic elections on a franchise that included all adult Germans – including women – Berlin was the stage for bloody street battles between communist would-be revolutionaries and the war-hardened soldiers deployed to quell their uprising.

As a seat of the dethroned Hohenzollern dynasty, Berlin was also associated with the old, Prussia-led Germany and, therefore, with a brand of militarism that had contributed to the outbreak of war in 1914. Germany needed to convince the world – and itself – that it was open to the idea of reinvention.

Weimar seemed the ideal launchpad for a new national project. As the capital of the small state of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, it was neither in Prussia nor in any of the other major German states. It was safe, centrally located and relatively untouched by the political violence that raged in larger cities. Most importantly, it was a powerful symbol that a new Germany could emerge from the ruins of the old.

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Weimar was widely regarded as Germany’s cultural capital. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), the closest thing Germany has to a national poet, had once lived and worked here, as had his friend and fellow writer Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805). Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1760) resided in Weimar for years, as did composer Franz Liszt (1811–86) and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). Weimar’s place in German culture far exceeds its physical size. All in all, it was the ideal setting for an ambitious rebrand.

The Social Democrat Friedrich Ebert, elected as the first president of the republic, knew all this. When he opened the National Assembly in the town’s theatre on 6 February 1919, he proclaimed: “Here in Weimar we must achieve the transformation from imperialism to idealism, from world domination to spiritual greatness… Now the spirit of Weimar, the spirit of great thinkers and poets, must fill our lives again.”

So the first German republic became a “Weimar Republic”. It is telling, however, that the person who coined this term was Hitler. Officially, the postwar state was still called the German Reich (meaning ‘kingdom’ or ‘empire’), as it had been under the kaiser – a hint that regime change is easier than a change in culture. And in 1929, the future dictator and other enemies of the fragile democracy used its 10th anniversary to deploy the term ‘Weimar Republic’ in a derogatory fashion, deriding the system as un-German.

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Designs on change

There was much about the new ‘spirit of Weimar’ that riled not just the Nazis but also many conservatives. In the early 1920s, the town drew radically creative minds. A key moment was when Walter Gropius agreed to settle in Weimar and establish the Bauhaus (literally: ‘building house’) art school in 1919. With his arrival, the town had attracted one of the most influential names in world architecture. Many other illustrious figures followed, among them the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky and Swiss-born artist Paul Klee. In its revolutionary approach, fusing design and craftsmanship with industrial mass production, the Bauhaus had a huge influence on the way we live today, sowing the seed for everything from IKEA flat-packs to clearer typography, prefabricated housing and the cantilever chair.

Sensing the explosive potential of Bauhaus ideas, Weimar’s conservative elites pushed back hard. Their ire was aimed at both the burgeoning Bauhaus movement and those who represented it – students and teachers, an eclectic mix of men and women, many of whom had left-leaning outlooks that ranged from moderate to communist. Scandalously, some students lived in communes and went skinny-dipping in the river Ilm. Many wore distinctive, proto-hippy garments such as sandals and long, loose shirts provocatively referred to as Russen-kittel (Russian smocks), donned in protest against middle-class convention. It all smacked of social decay to conservatives, many of whom existed in a permanent state of moral panic brought on by the dizzying speed of postwar change. They drove Gropius’s art school out of town in 1925, and the Nazis closed the Bauhaus entirely in 1933.

Nursery of Nazism

Though Weimar was, in many ways, an epicentre of modernism, it was also an early stronghold of the Nazi movement. The first formal Nazi Party rally was held in Weimar in 1926, before such gatherings were relocated to Nuremberg. Weimar was where the Hitler Youth received its name, and where significant Nazi rituals such as the Hitler salute were first presented to the public. Nazi polling numbers in Weimar usually exceeded their average across Germany, and the town became the seat of the first state government to appoint a Nazi minister, in 1930, three years before Hitler became Germany’s chancellor.

As Weimar became a haven for the movement and a testing ground for Nazi ideas, its people found themselves on the frontline of the culture wars that played out across interwar Germany. With its peculiar combination of small-town life and cultural prestige, the town was home to both ordinary and illustrious people during the 1920s and 1930s, all striving to ride the waves of history – or, at least, to avoid being drowned. Individual stories of Weimar’s residents offer revealing and fascinating case studies of how people behave in times of crisis.

Take Carl Weirich, a stationer and bookbinder. He moved to Weimar from nearby Eisenach in 1914 to take over a well-established stationery shop in the heart of the old town, just a short walk away from the theatre in which the Weimar Republic was founded. He’d arrived with great hopes for the future – only to be faced by the impacts of two world wars and a multitude of crises that hit both his business and his family.

Weirich was fascinated by paper, ink, typewriters and the written word. He meticulously kept a diary that details his story and is often surprisingly frank, providing unique, granular insights into life between the wars. Fundamentally, he was not a political man. His diary records more on the hiking tours he conducted each Sunday – come rain, come shine, come democracy, come dictatorship – than on the minutiae of current affairs. Yet politics touched every aspect of his life. When the National Assembly convened a stone’s throw from his shop in 1919, he attended some of the public sessions to see how “the new people presented themselves who would represent the fatherland headed by Fritz Ebert”.

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Running a small shop that offered bookbinding services as well as fountain pens for schoolchildren and postcards for tourists, Weirich wasn’t rich, but he was comparatively comfortable when the economy was stable. During times of crisis, however, it felt as if the rug was being pulled from beneath his feet. In the spring of 1923, when hyperinflation began to hit the young republic hard, he bought a used bicycle for 2 million marks. Had he held on to the money until September, the same amount would have bought him a loaf of bread or an egg.

During the Great Depression that followed the Wall Street crash of 1929, he once again suffered a reversal of fortunes as economic despair threatened to rob him and his young family of house, shop, home and livelihood. One government after another had failed to make things better. At the end of 1932, Weirich – like millions of his fellow Germans – was ready to pin his hopes on one “young man, the Führer of the National Socialist Party A. Hitler”. The war that “young man” would unleash just a few years later would leave Weimar – and, with it, the life Weirich had built for himself – in ash and ruin.

Hosting Hitler

Weimar’s women who found themselves caught up in events also tried to shape their own destinies. Take Rosa Schmidt, a hotelier of Jewish heritage who, together with her husband, Arthur – a decorated war veteran from an old Protestant Weimar family – ran the Hotel Hohenzollern by the train station. The couple struggled to keep their business afloat during the challenging postwar years and hyperinflation. So when Hitler and his supporters booked the hotel repeatedly for early Nazi visits to Weimar, the Schmidts saw welcome opportunities to save their business from catastrophe. Hitler had no idea that his meals were prepared by a Jewish woman, even as he unleashed his antisemitic rants in her hotel. Rosa had no idea that her guest would bring death to the majority of European Jews, and that her family would be no exception.

At the other end of town, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche ran an archive that contained the papers of her late brother, Friedrich Nietzsche. After the philosopher suffered a mental breakdown in 1889, his sister became his carer until the time of his death 11 years later, and the self-appointed steward of his legacy thereafter. Permanently cash-strapped, she and the Nietzsche Archive relied on funding from generous donors and the various governments of the interwar era. Though not initially impressed by Hitler, Elisabeth soon embraced Nazism – and Nazism embraced Nietzsche.

Despite her politics, Elisabeth’s oldest friend remained the liberal Harry Graf Kessler, an Anglo-German aristocrat and diplomat who enjoyed the eccentric lifestyle of a cosmopolitan dandy. A gay man at a time when male homosexuality was illegal, he was careful not to draw too much attention to his relationships, but he nonetheless flaunted his bachelordom.

A mythical aura surrounded him almost from birth. Kaiser Wilhelm I had been so smitten with the boy’s beautiful mother that he had fostered the Kesslers’ swift rise, and became godfather to Harry’s younger sister, Wilhelmina. There were even rumours that the emperor was the illegitimate father of either or both of the Kessler children – something the younger man vehemently refuted. Multilingual, widely travelled and well-educated, the count felt as much at ease at court as he did in bars and ballrooms. He promoted art and moved to Weimar at the turn of the century, playing an integral part in its thriving cultural scene. There he befriended Elisabeth and helped to establish her brother’s archive.

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Expressing an agony that will be familiar to modern readers, Kessler frequently complained in his diary that, in a deeply polarised society, it had become difficult to maintain friendships across the political divide. As Elisabeth became increasingly nationalistic and eventually outright supportive of Nazism, he remained staunchly liberal and had to flee Germany when Hitler rose to power. In one letter to his old friend Elisabeth, Kessler wrote: “I have strived my whole life to, yes, take politics seriously since it belongs to those things on which our daily life and work depends, but to bar it from entering into my relationships.” The pair agreed to avoid political subjects, but this proved increasingly difficult in an era in which everything was political.

Monstrous ideas

Weimar changed politically and physically in the 1930s. The Nazis intended it to be a model town for their murderous dictatorship, and thus reshaped it architecturally and ideologically. Its inhabitants were forced to respond to what was happening, whether they wanted to do so or not. Teachers had to decide if they were happy to teach ‘racial hygiene’ in their lessons. Jews were dismissed from public sector jobs, no matter what they did. Registrar Heinrich Fleischhauer, a civil servant, was soon expected to sign death certificates for the victims of the Buchenwald concentration camp.

Many of those who spent time in Weimar in the 1920s made remarkably contrasting choices in the 1930s. Take Marlene Dietrich, who was sent to Weimar in her late teens to study violin with the best musicians. Or Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus school. Neither found life in Nazi Germany bearable, and both chose to live in the US rather than remain in a country run by Hitler. Dietrich renounced her German citizenship in 1939 and became an American. Other inhabitants of Weimar embraced Nazism. Emmy Sonnemann worked as an actress at the Weimar theatre. One day in 1932, she happened to be sitting in the Kaiser Café when an important-looking man in uniform stepped in. It was Hermann Göring. The two married in 1935. Hitler was their best man.

• Read more | Who was Hermann Göring? The truth about Hitler’s drug-fuelled enforcer who met his downfall at Nuremberg

Very few citizens of the town actively resisted Nazism. One of those who did was Kurt Nehrling, a young Social Democrat who returned from serving in the First World War with a debilitating case of tuberculosis. He allowed neither his illness nor personal setbacks to deter him from fighting for his convictions and, in resisting Nazism, he put both himself and his family in grave danger. Nehrling didn’t survive the Second World War. Arrested by the SS, he was executed at Dachau in 1943.

When the Americans occupied Weimar in the spring of 1945, they found that people such as Nehrling represented a tiny minority. To quote the American documentary Death Mills, filmed at liberated concentration camps including Buchenwald, the majority of Weimar’s citizens “had put themselves gladly into the hands of criminals and lunatics”.

A zone of interest

What roles did the people of Weimar play in Germany’s descent into darkness? Were they were culpable for the horrors of Nazism? Weimar’s citizens had, after all, found it possible to go hiking and sledging a stone’s throw from a concentration camp, and sleep soundly in their beds at night. They’d cheered on Hitler and stood by when Jewish neighbours were sent to their deaths. It’s always easier to condemn than it is to explain, but in the latter lies the key to understanding history and, ultimately, to drawing meaningful conclusions from it.

Asking why Germans acted the way they did is not the same as justifying their choices. If we are to avoid the mistakes made by people in the past, the first step is to understand why these mistakes were made. No one is entirely free to act outside the circumstances in which they find themselves. But that doesn’t mean that people lack agency. Interwar Germany has long fascinated scholars and the public precisely because it embodies the tension between the individual and the collective, between inevitability and responsibility – and nowhere was this truer than in Weimar, where many of the contrasting pathways of the interwar era came together.

Weimar – with all of its inherent contradictions, with the hopes and fears of a nation stamped onto its houses and streets – acted as a crucible of German history between the world wars. In Weimar, both good and evil ideas were forged, tried and tested. The townspeople were, variously, observers, participants, perpetrators, bystanders and victims of events that shaped Germany, Europe and the world. Studying their behaviour, both as individuals and as members of society, gets us closer to understanding how Nazism took hold, and how it was able to spread its pernicious influence far beyond its fanatical core.

It is in these dynamics that we may find instructive points to help us safeguard democracy and freedom in our own time. When you piece together the human mosaic of Weimar, one stark lesson stands out: no amount of history, tradition or culture is sufficient on its own to safeguard against takeover by a ruthless totalitarian ideology. Democracy and civilisation are maintained or destroyed by the choices we make as individuals and as societies. There is no better place and time to study this than interwar Weimar, a town where people conjured up dreams of a better world – but woke to find themselves living under tyranny.

This article was first published in the July 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

]]> The death of Adolf Hitler https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-death-of-adolf-hitler-podcast/ Mon, 11 May 2026 11:31:08 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-death-of-adolf-hitler-podcast/ Caroline Sharples reveals the long afterlife of Adolf Hitler – from the initial bewilderment surrounding his death in 1945, to the ongoing interest in surviving biomedical evidence What do we really know about Adolf Hitler’s death? In this episode of the HistoryExtra podcast, historian and author Caroline Sharples tells Charlotte Vosper about the reporting that surrounded Hitler's final days in April 1945, the subsequent discoveries of biological evidence, and our ongoing fascination with finding out more – ultimately revealing what really happened in the Führerbunker in 1945.

]]> 16 of the worst monarchs in history https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/9-of-the-worst-monarchs-in-history/ Fri, 17 Apr 2026 11:12:27 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/medieval/9-of-the-worst-monarchs-in-history/ From the morally bankrupt to the staggeringly inept, Jonny Wilkes guides us through the lives of 16 rulers who wrote their names into the history books for all the wrong reasons The past has no shortage of disastrous kings, queens, and other rulers; such a list could easily have been filled with the worst Roman emperors alone. Some have been homicidal, like Nero or Genghis Khan; simply incompetent, like Edward II; completely untrustworthy, like Charles I; or amiable but inadequate, like Louis XVI of France.

But who are truly the worst, and why? Jonny Wilkes makes the case against 16 rulers from history…

1. Lucius Tarquinius Superbus

King of Rome, 534–509 BC

Before Rome had emperors, it had a line of kings going back to the city’s mythical founder, Romulus. The last, however, presided over a reign of terror so bad that the people gave up on the monarchy altogether, heralding the dawn of the Republic.

Lucius Tarquinius Superbus (commonly known as ‘Tarquin the Proud’) had seized the throne by planning the assassination of his own father-in-law, then once in power he killed senators on a whim and imprisoned or executed anyone suspected of disloyalty.

His undoing came when his son raped a noblewoman, which caused such outrage that a revolt broke out that saw the tyrannical king overthrown and exiled. In his doomed attempts to regain the throne, he persuaded neighbouring cities to attack Rome, seemingly unfazed by the damage this would do to his erstwhile kingdom.

2. Commodus

Roman emperor, 177–92 AD

There are a number of contenders to the title of ‘most despicable emperor of Rome’, so we could just as easily be discussing the cruel and murderous rules of, say, Nero and Caligula.

The bloodthirsty, vainglorious spendthrift, Commodus, however, went from inheriting an empire enjoying a long period of peace and prosperity, the Pax Romana, to leaving it broke and in turmoil. If not executing anyone he suspected of plotting against him, he was leaving the job of ruling the empire to a series of corrupt, cruel and incompetent favourites. He much preferred to fight as a gladiator, relishing in slaughtering a menagerie of animals in the arena.

No wonder, then, that Commodus was chosen as the villain in Ridley Scott’s swords-and-sandals masterpiece, Gladiator.

3. John

King of England, 1199–1216

Seriously, how could the arch-villain of Robin Hood not make an appearance? Beyond the tale of the fabled outlaw, John severely damaged the authority of the English monarchy. As a prince, he angered the nobles of Ireland and attempted to steal his brother Richard I’s crown, only ending up as king after Richard died without a legitimate heir. Notably, he also managed to outmanoeuvre a rival claim from his nephew, Arthur of Brittany, whom he is later believed to have had murdered.

Within a few years in power, John had lost Normandy – the foundation of his family’s Angevin empire on the continent – then he emptied the kingdom’s coffers trying to win it back. His oppressively high taxes, his clashes with the church and his cruel and conniving personality all led to a revolt of England’s barons.

Under threat of civil war, John was forced to seal Magna Carta, a historic document that limited royal power. He then proceeded to ignore it. The barons rose up again and John’s reign ended, dying of dysentery, as he fought to keep hold of his kingdom.

• Read more | How King John helped bring about a political miracle in medieval England

4. Wanyan Chenglin

Emperor of the Jin dynasty, 1234

On 9 February 1234, with the warriors of the Mongol empire besieging the city of Caizhou, the emperor of the Jin dynasty in China, Aizong, knew that his 10-year reign would be over shortly. That said, he did not want to be the last in his line, so he abdicated and passed the throne to his general, Wanyan Chenglin, before taking his own life.

The reluctant new emperor began a reign that would be doomed to last just a matter of hours. He was killed leading his soldiers in a last stand when the Mongols broke through the city walls.

5. Charles the Bad

King of Navarre, 1349–87

The name gives away why he belongs on this list, doesn’t it? Charles earned ‘the Bad’ for his duplicitous and treacherous behaviour in the Hundred Years’ War between England and France. Although King of Navarre in Spain, he owned a lot of land in northern France, which put him in the middle of the conflict, and his response was to keep flipping sides.

Driven solely by ambition, he believed he should be on the French throne, and he plotted and murdered to get it. All the while, Navarre went ignored. What made him truly bad, though, was that his schemes failed utterly. Charles is perhaps best-known today for his grisly end in 1387, when the brandy-soaked sheets he had been wrapped in to cure an illness accidentally caught fire, burning him alive.

6. Henry VI

King of England, 1422–61, 1470–71

Ascending the throne of England as an infant and the son of the hero of Agincourt, the young Henry VI was always going to struggle to live up to his dynastic legacy.

Not helped by his total lack of leadership, it went even worse than feared: he lost control of France (won by his father Henry V), suffered a mental breakdown, and saw his kingdom plunge into the Wars of the Roses. The Lancastrian cause would be headed not by the king, but his queen, Margaret.

Henry’s role amounted to being kicked off the throne by the Yorkist Edward IV, then placed back on it by the ‘kingmaker’, the Earl of Warwick, and finally losing it again after being captured.

• Read more | The power behind the throne: women in the Wars of the Roses

7. Christian II

King of Denmark and Norway, 1513–23

Christian’s reign may seem more insignificant than terrible at first glance, but it signalled the end of the Kalmar Union, which had bound together the Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Norway and Sweden for well over a century. Having been crowned in the first two of those countries in 1513, he set out to secure the third.

It would not be until 1520 that he captured Stockholm, although, hardly magnanimous in victory, his immediate action was to execute 82 nobles. The so-called Stockholm Bloodbath fuelled a Swedish rebellion against Christian and weakened his authority back in Denmark and Norway.

He was overthrown and exiled, and then when he launched a desperate bid to win back his thrones by force, he was imprisoned for the rest of his life.

8. Ivan the Terrible

Tsar of Russia, 1547–84

As the first tsar, Ivan was in some ways an able ruler since he laid the foundations of the Russian empire. He became known as ‘the Terrible’ for a reason, though. Having hated the nobles from an early age (at 13, he had one fed to a pack of dogs), he wasted no time in purging the upper classes.

The domain he inherited clearly was not enough: he instigated numerous, and disastrous, wars of expansion, and even established his own fiefdom within his land where, essentially, anything went. With Ivan prone to paranoia and fits of rage, no one was safe: he ordered a full-on attack on one of his own cities, Novgorod, and beat his daughter-in-law into having a miscarriage, then murdered his son.

9. Rudolf II

Holy Roman Emperor, 1576–1612

Despite being hailed as a generous patron of the arts and sciences, Habsburg emperor Rudolf II utterly failed in his role as the leader of one of Europe’s major powers. Rather than focusing on politics and administration, he instead shut himself away to focus on personal pursuits like alchemy.

When he did show some determination – starting a war with the Ottoman empire to unify Christendom – it proved a disaster. His subjects in Hungary revolted and his family made him hand over power to his younger brother.

Rudolf’s most damning legacy, however, was that his miserable tenure as emperor has been blamed as one of the causes of the Thirty Years’ War, one of the bloodiest conflicts in history.

• Read more | What was the Habsburg jaw?

10. Louis XV

King of France, 1715–74

It could certainly be argued that Louis XV’s status as a poor king of France was overshadowed by his successor, Louis XVI, since he was the one who lost his head in the French Revolution. Yet Louis XV’s reign sowed the seeds of the people’s discontent that would lead to such a violent rejection of the monarchy. In short, he was a deeply ineffectual ruler, let alone the all-powerful absolutist king that France had become accustomed to under Louis XIV.

Reports of corruption and handing over influence to his mistresses hurt the crown’s authority, while his wars and extravagant spending depleted the coffers. France became a less powerful nation under his rule, and smaller too: he gave up New France in the Americas after the disastrous Seven Years’ War.

11. Ferdinand VII

King of Spain, 1808, 1813–33

Shortly after taking the throne in 1808, Ferdinand handed over his kingdom – and himself – to Napoleon Bonaparte. Six years of captivity in France later, he returned with a need to prove his absolutist credentials and so ditched Spain’s liberal constitution that had been written in his absence. This led to multiple uprisings, notably the revolt of 1820, which ushered in three years during which the king was forced to accept a constitutional regime.

While more selfish than monstrous, Ferdinand’s legacy and place on this list were confirmed by two things: he oversaw the loss of nearly all of Spain’s colonial territories in the Americas and, following his death, his petty bid to exclude his brother from the succession resulted in a long civil war.

12. Ranavalona I

Queen of Imerina, 1828–61

To try and hold back the wave of European colonisation in Africa, Queen Ranavalona I, of modern-day Madagascar, would go to any lengths. She wanted to purge all foreign influence, expelling missionaries, persecuting Christians and restricting trade. She even tried to have a giant pair of scissors made so that she could literally chop foreigners in half.

The ones who suffered the most, however, were her people: to preserve her land’s self-sufficiency and way of life, as she saw it, Ranavalona used forced labour for her royal projects and fear to maintain order.

Many executions took the form of the tangena ordeal, a witch-hunt-style trial where the accused was made to ingest poison and if they showed any adverse effects, they were deemed guilty. It is claimed that as much as 50 per cent of the population perished during her rule.

• Read more | “Africans have been starved of historical figures from their own lands that they can look up to”: Paula Akpan on female African leaders

13. Leopold II

King of the Belgians, 1865–1909

Leopold II may not have been a terrible king in Belgium itself, but with the Congo Free State, he revealed just how much of a monster he could be. In 1885, he created his own state in central Africa, having convinced European powers that he intended to improve the lives of the people living there.

In reality, this privately owned kingdom allowed Leopold to exploit the Congolese people so that he could make money from its ivory and natural rubber reserves. Under his system of forced labour, any workers who failed to meet their quotas would be punished with mutilation. Leopold’s preferred method was chopping off hands and feet. Millions died from the brutality and rampant diseases.

This was an age where European empires carved up and exploited the African continent, so the fact that international outrage finally forced Leopold to hand over the Congo Free State illustrates the appalling extent of the atrocities.

14. Khalid ibn Barghash

Sultan of Zanzibar, 1896

Not only did Khalid ibn Barghash rule for just three days, but he was ousted in the shortest war in history. So, in truth, there is no knowing whether he would have been a bad ruler: there wasn’t enough time. In 1896, the sultan of Zanzibar died, which put the British in a tough position. They controlled the islands off the east African coast as it served as a strategic trade post for the Indian Ocean.

Against British wishes, Khalid, who may well have killed his predecessor, assumed the role of sultan and fortified the palace with around 3,000 supporters. The British sent warships, though, and initiated a brief bombardment. The Anglo-Zanzibar War lasted around 38 minutes, and Khalid fled into exile.

15. Nicholas II

Tsar of Russia, 1894–1917

The Romanov dynasty ruled Russia for more than 300 years – and it all ended during the reign of Nicholas II. Not suited to wielding autocratic power over a huge empire, he made a catalogue of errors and refused to adapt beyond his rigid belief that he had the divinely ordained right to rule.

In 1905 alone, Russia lost a war with Japan and broke out in revolution, yet Nicholas only made cursory changes and tried to move on. His court became dominated by the strange and ambitious mystic, Rasputin, his nobles and politicians abandoned him, and his decision to take command of the armies in the First World War meant that he was held personally responsible for every defeat and death.

Revolution erupted again in 1917, forcing his abdication. While imprisoned by the revolutionaries, Nicholas and his entire family were murdered. It was a bloody and definitive end to the tsars, as Russia became a communist regime.

16. Edward VIII

King of England, 1936

Edward became king on 20 January 1936, on the death of his father George V. Before the year was out, he had abdicated in disgrace. His brief reign had entirely been focused on his wish to marry an American named Wallis Simpson, but she had been divorced once and was seeking a second, making her wholly unacceptable to the royal family, the political establishment and the church.

Yet his reputation as a bad monarch could have been even worse had he stayed: Edward has long been accused of being a Nazi sympathiser, who toured Hitler’s Germany almost two years before the Second World War.

]]> Churchill vs Stalin: did this one speech cause the Cold War? https://www.historyextra.com/membership/churchill-vs-stalin-did-this-one-speech-cause-the-cold-war/ Fri, 20 Mar 2026 15:30:35 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/churchill-vs-stalin-did-this-one-speech-cause-the-cold-war/ It’s 80 years since the war victor delivered his ‘Iron Curtain’ speech, sounding the alarm for a perilous new age. The speech, given as tensions with Stalin soared, is among the most famous in modern history. Yet, asks Richard Toye, has it been misunderstood? “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent.” It was the soundbite of the century – or at least of the Cold War. Uttered by a former prime minister in a speech on 5 March 1946 at a small college in Missouri, its intended audience was far larger than the scholars and public figures assembled in the institution’s gymnasium. The fact that the ex-PM in question was war victor Winston Churchill – and that sitting on stage alongside him was US president Harry S Truman – helped turn this lecture into a world-shaking historical event.

Churchill made a lot of speeches in his long political career. Few of them, however, had the same resounding impact as this warning about the Soviet threat. A set of unique circumstances lent his oration its unusual power – and endowed it with the capacity to shape the language of east-west conflict for decades to come.

The Iron Curtain speech was delivered at a time of acute – and escalating – tensions between the Soviet Union and western powers. It’s often been described as the moment that the starting gun was fired on the Cold War. It’s indisputably among the most momentous pieces of oratory of the postwar period. And yet, for all that, it’s clouded in misunderstanding.

Much of that misapprehension stems from the fact that the speech had surprisingly long roots – roots stretching all the way back to Anglo-Russian imperial conflicts in the late 19th century. When Churchill rose to his feet and addressed his audience at Fulton, he was 71 years old. He was, as he declared himself, a child of the Victorian age. The legacy of the so-called ‘Great Game’ – strategic competition between Britain and Russia in central Asia – was a factor throughout his political career. Even as a schoolboy, he wrote an essay in which he fantasised about a British invasion of Russia and gloated of “the superiority of John Bull over the Russian bear”.

Strangling Bolshevism

Yet Churchill’s attitude to Russia – and even to the USSR – was by no means one 
of unremitting hostility. And that was reflected in the Fulton speech, too. He was no admirer of tsarist autocracy, and even less so of Soviet communism. But during the First World War he eulogised Britain’s Russian allies, and was distressed when they dropped out of the conflict.

Churchill became the strongest advocate of intervention in the civil war that followed the October Revolution of 1917, and always regretted the failure “to strangle Bolshevism at its birth”. Following Hitler’s rise to power, he began to see the Soviet Union as a counterweight to Nazi Germany, and even as a possible ally. In a March 1939 interview, he asserted that the USSR had “hitherto shown no trace of the aggressive intentions” behind the recent actions of the Germans, the Italians and the Japanese. Even after the Soviets and Germans signed a non-aggression pact that August, he appeared to foresee that the USSR’s national interests would eventually force Stalin into an anti-German posture.

His prediction came true with Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. The functional but troubled Anglo-Soviet alliance that followed provides the crucial backdrop to the breakdown in relations that the Iron Curtain speech signalled.

Churchill continued to view diplomacy through a traditional ‘Great Power’ lens. That is to say, history was made via hard bargains between the paramount countries, recognising each other’s spheres of influence and legitimate interests, and often involving the ruthless sacrifice of weaker peoples and nations.

Churchill’s wartime meetings and correspondence with Stalin were based on this principle – and also on the belief that personal relations were crucial, and that his own individual charm could make a difference. He said in 1942 that he “liked Mr Stalin, liked his jokes and his humour, but could have gotten on with him a lot better if he could have talked with him directly instead of through an interpreter”. Combining tough talk with schmoozing and flattery, he believed that mutual recognition of British and Soviet spheres of interest represented the path to a safer future. The Iron Curtain speech of 1946 reflected the continuation of this approach, rather than a radical shift in outlook.

• Read more | Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt: the big three's war of words

Falling for Stalin’s charms

Churchill, however, oscillated between optimistic and pessimistic interpretations of Soviet behaviour. After the February 1945 Yalta conference – at which the British, Soviet and American leaders discussed the postwar reorganisation of Europe – the prime minister told colleagues: “Poor Neville Chamberlain believed he could trust Hitler. He was wrong. But I don’t think I’m wrong about Stalin.” Yet as the Red Army’s advance progressed, he became increasingly concerned about the prospect of Soviet dominance of Europe. On 12 May, just a few days after VE Day, Churchill wrote to President Truman of the need to reach a concordat with the USSR before the British and American armies ‘melted’ with the onset of peace. “An iron curtain is drawn down between their front,” he added. This was his first rehearsal of a phrase he would later make famous.

Six days later, Churchill lectured the Soviet ambassador, accusing his Kremlin masters of “dropping an iron screen across Europe from Lubeck to Trieste, behind which we had no knowledge of what was happening”. Churchill’s diatribe did not have the desired effect. The ambassador told Moscow that “we need to bear in mind that we are dealing with an adventurer, for whom war is his natural element”. Indeed, Churchill was already pondering ‘Operation Unthinkable’, a military plan – quickly dropped – for a potential military conflict with the Soviets. But at the Potsdam conference of July 1945 (at which the ‘Big Three’ Allied leaders convened once more), he was, in the words of foreign secretary Anthony Eden, “under Stalin’s spell again”. Eden reported that Churchill "kept repeating: 'I like that man.'"

Churchill’s participation in the negotiations was about to be brought to a sudden and unexpected end – for, before the Potsdam conference was concluded, news came through that he had been voted out of power in that summer’s general election. Churchill’s shock electoral defeat was a bitter political and personal blow, but it didn’t have a material impact on Anglo-Soviet relations: the new Labour government carried on foreign policy on familiar lines. When parliament reassembled, Churchill made his 
first public reference to “the iron curtain which at the moment divides Europe in twain”. His words were reported in the press but did not make headlines, and attracted little comment.

It should be noted that Churchill was now speaking in a new context, following the successful test of the atomic bomb and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Though he could not say so openly, he hoped that the American monopoly of the new weapon would be the lever that would keep Soviet ambitions in check. He was thoroughly conscious of Britain’s weakening global strength, and believed that a strong relationship with the US was key to escaping its precarious position.

For this reason, the message he received from Truman that autumn was a godsend. The president passed on an invitation from the head of Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri to deliver the annual John Findley Green Foundation Lecture on problems of international concern. “This is a wonderful school in my home state,” scribbled Truman on the letter. “Hope you can do it. I’ll introduce you.” Churchill, still harbouring designs of returning to Downing Street, now had an opportunity to relaunch himself on the world stage, as well as to take a holiday in the sun.

During his lengthy absence from home at the start of 1946, Churchill sojourned in Florida and Cuba before travelling to Washington, DC. Truman accompanied him to Fulton by train.

As the train approached Missouri, a crisis was unfolding in Persia (now Iran) on the back of a speech by Stalin that seemed to anticipate conflict with the capitalist powers. The Soviets had failed to withdraw all of their troops from the north of Persia by the deadline that had previously been agreed. But though the president was increasingly incensed by their stonewalling stance, he was not yet ready to lay his fears and frustrations in front of his war-weary populace. With no official responsibilities, however, Churchill could speak frankly in a way that those in government could not.

• Read more | How the Cold War made the modern world

The bombshell moment

On 5 March, Churchill delivered his remarks before 2,700 people, all of them white. As one black American newspaper noted, the college was “located in a state where Jim Crow is a legal instrument of government 
and Negro boys and girls are barred from its portals by law”. The mainstream media made little of this shocking fact, but the message contained within the speech itself was regarded as a bombshell.

Churchill’s oration was 46 minutes and 5,000 words long. The ‘iron curtain’ phrase came at the two-thirds mark. It was part of a broader warning about the Soviet Union’s “expansive and proselytising tendencies”, which Churchill backed up with claims about Moscow’s search for “totalitarian control” in the countries of central and eastern Europe.

Yet despite the muscular rhetoric, scholars now tend to emphasise that the Iron Curtain speech was not a Cold War clarion call intended to stoke tensions. This is another way in which the speech has been misunderstood. Churchill undoubtedly wanted to reset relations through plain speaking, but he also wanted to show the Soviets that he understood their perspective. Hence he stressed his “strong admiration and regard for the valiant Russian people and for my wartime comrade, Marshal Stalin”. He stated that he understood “the Russian need to be secure on her western frontiers by the removal of all possibility of German aggression”. It was necessary, he said, to reach “a good understanding on all points with Russia” under the auspices of the recently formed United Nations.

Over the following days and weeks, few observers paid much heed to the more emollient sentiments in Churchill’s speech. The nuances of the former PM’s words were easily lost in the media tumult. In fact, the forcefulness of his overall message risked exacerbating the problem he was trying to solve.

“Churchill’s speech is sure some blockbuster, as one American paper describes it,” noted one ordinary observer, a female librarian back in Britain. “I read it first in full, and later heard extracts; and I must say that his delivery was so calm and flowing that the parts which had horrified me in print seemed perfectly innocuous as he spoke them.”

Churchill offered not only a diagnosis of the perils of deteriorating east-west relations but also a remedy – and in the US it was the latter that proved especially divisive. He urged that a robust response to the Soviets should be built upon “a special relationship between the British Commonwealth and empire and the United States”. This seemingly innocuous phrase was widely (and correctly) perceived as a concealed call for a military alliance between the UK and the US.

• Read more | Winston Churchill created the special relationship. Could Donald Trump kill it?

This lit a fire, because former isolationists still distrusted the British empire, and progressive idealists believed that a bilateral pact would be a threat to the integrity of the UN. Leo Amery, Churchill’s former secretary of state for India and Burma, thought it was an error to link the admonitions about the Soviets and the alliance concept together in one speech. “The Americans are intensely suspicious of any attempt to inveigle them into being mere instruments of British policy in the Old World,” observe Amery. Meanwhile, Adam Clayton Powell, the first African American to represent New York in Congress, claimed that Churchill wanted 
“an English-speaking dictatorship” and “a form of super-nationalism based on race” that would plunge 
the world once again into war.

Truman had known of the speech’s contents in advance but, when the political kitchen heated up, denied having done so. Britain’s Labour prime minister, Clement Attlee, took refuge in the claim that his government was “not called upon to express any opinion of a speech delivered in another country by a private individual”. However, in private he was less dismissive: “It will certainly have done good if it encourages the Americans to think and to recognise the need for the United States and the British Commonwealth to work together,” he said.

The destiny of the world

It is not clear if Churchill really expected the speech to cause the Soviets to change their attitude – but if so, he failed. “Hitler began his work of unleashing war by proclaiming a race theory, declaring that only German-speaking people constituted a superior nation,” Stalin told the Soviet state-mouthpiece, Pravda. “Mr Churchill sets out to unleash war with a race theory, asserting that only English-speaking nations 
are superior nations, who are called upon to decide the destinies of the entire world.” With fear spreading, 
Moscow housewives started panic-buying. The Soviet authorities then tried to calm the public, spreading the message that “Stalin’s interview did not mean that war was in sight”.

The Fulton speech may have elicited a frosty reception in Moscow but, within a year, despite the initial misgivings, its once-controversial message had found widespread acceptance in the west. As tensions between America and the Soviet Union ratcheted up further, the 1947 Truman Doctrine committed the US to “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures”. The doctrine is now seen by some historians as marking the true start of the Cold War. To this day, politicians on both sides of the Atlantic pay lip service to the Anglo-American ‘special relationship’.

And Churchill was not quite done with the Soviet Union. Prime minister again from 1951–55, he ploughed his remaining strength into a vain quest for a rapprochement with the post-Stalin Kremlin. This was not because he had changed his mind; rather, his quest for détente was of a piece with his longstanding approach 
to great power relations and his belief in the importance of negotiating from a position of strength. He was convinced that the greatest chance of peace lay in convincing the Soviet government that they were confronted by superior force that would be used ruthlessly against them unless they mended their ways. “Then the communists will make a bargain,” he judged.

East-west relations would have continued 
declining with or without the Iron Curtain speech. 
Yet although Churchill did not start the Cold War at Fulton, he selected its defining image – and with carefully crafted vocabulary he created an indelible mental picture that influenced all subsequent debate.

Metal coinage

Was Churchill really the first to use the phrase 'Iron Curtain'?

“Iron curtain: a state of rigid censorship and secrecy (coined by Winston Churchill in 1946 to describe the line of demarcation between western Europe and the Soviet zone of influence)”. This was the definition included in the American College Dictionary. But the editors remained uncertain – had Churchill genuinely originated the term? In 1951, a member of that publication’s team wrote to him to find out.

There were good reasons for wondering. The metaphor is based not on conventional domestic drapes but on the fire safety curtains used in theatres. In a 1904 novel, Churchill’s friend HG Wells (pictured) described how, when a character is deprived of his freedom, “an iron curtain… dropped between him and the outer world”. The historian Patrick Wright credits the writer Vernon Lee (a pseudonym for Violet Paget) as being the first to deploy the term in an international relations context. She wrote of “war’s monstrous iron curtain” dividing the two sides after the outbreak of hostilities in 1914. 

After the October 1917 revolution, the phrase was used in a new sense. In her 1920 book Through Bolshevik Russia, Ethel Snowden described her arrival in Petrograd as part of a Labour delegation: “We were behind the ‘iron curtain’ at last!”

It is more than possible that Churchill was acquainted with these examples. But, if so, the influence was unconscious. In response to the query about the origins of his words, he replied: “No. I didn’t hear of the phrase before – though everyone has heard of the ‘iron curtain’ which descends in a theatre.” The dictionary definition stood.

The fact that Churchill saw ‘iron curtain’ as a standard expression may explain why he did not do more to attract attention to it. The official title of his speech was ‘The Sinews of Peace’. This, in turn, offers a clue as to why the famous phrase didn’t dominate newspaper headlines. The Daily Express, for example, ran with “CHURCHILL URGES EMPIRE ‘ALLIANCE’ WITH U.S”. The first BBC reporting, on the 11pm radio news, omitted the ‘iron curtain’ passage altogether.

Churchill was a genius with words. But even he did not know which of his own would be best remembered.

Was ChurcWas Churchill really the first to use the phrase ‘Iron Curtain’?hill really the first to use the ph

Richard Toye is professor of modern history at the University of Exeter. He is co-host of the podcast Churchill: The Finest Half Hour

This article was first published in the March 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

]]> "We shall never surrender": 14 quotes that have defined the past century https://www.historyextra.com/membership/10-quotations-that-defined-the-20th-century/ Fri, 13 Mar 2026 15:54:08 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/10-quotations-that-defined-the-20th-century/ Words have the power to alter the course of history. They can harden the resolve of an entire nation or people, encapsulate the ideals of a movement, and evoke joy – or provoke anger – long after they have been said. Here, Dr Seán Lang explores 14 of the most influential quotes of the past 100 years

1. “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”

Franklin D Roosevelt, 1933

The United States lay devastated by the Great Depression, an economic collapse without precedent that destroyed the country’s global image as a land of opportunity and reduced millions of Americans to poverty and destitution. The governor of New York, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had run for and won the presidency on the promise of a massive recovery programme, dubbed the ‘New Deal’, but he knew he could do nothing unless the American people first regained their self-belief.

In his inaugural address on 4 March 1933, Roosevelt reassured them that they had nothing to fear, except fear itself – “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror, which paralyses needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.”

The New Deal lasted throughout the 1930s until World War II set the country back towards full employment. Through the programme of reforms, regulations and projects, Roosevelt understood the power of words. He explained policies simply and clearly to radio listeners in his ‘fireside chats’, reassuring Americans that they had what it would take to improve their own lives and that the government would help. Roosevelt was elected an unprecedented four times, but it was that first inaugural message that set the tone for his time in office and helped give back the US its self-belief.

2. “We shall never surrender”

Winston Churchill, 1940

By June 1940, it seemed that Hitler had won his war. He had conquered Poland; launched a devastating assault in Denmark and Norway; and attacked in the west, invading the Netherlands and Belgium, and storming through northern France to cut off the British army and much of the French. It was only a matter of time before France was forced to surrender and German troops entered triumphantly into Paris. To any impartial observer, it seemed obvious that Britain had no choice but to seek a peace settlement with Hitler. But Winston Churchill, Britain’s pugnacious and controversial new prime minister, decided to ignore those pressing him to do just that.

In an electrifying speech to the House of Commons on 4 June 1940, later broadcast on the BBC, he declared that Britain would fight on and never surrender – that “we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be”. Churchill knew that Britain’s navy and air force would make a German invasion hazardous, though not impossible, and that the only chance of defeating Nazism was to keep going until the United States could join the war. His words defined the stubborn defiance and ‘Dunkirk spirit’, which saved not just Britain but the world from a Nazi victory.

3. “The atom bomb is a paper tiger”

Mao Zedong, 1946

The dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 redefined the world. Leaders had always been able to plunge their peoples into war, but now they could wipe out whole cities, even countries, with a single order. While the United States was the only one with nuclear capability at first, the Soviet Union was not far behind thanks to communist spies in the west passing nuclear secrets to Moscow.

• Read more | Reign of the red terror: Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution

In an interview with American journalist Anna Louise Strong in 1946, the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, Mao Zedong, described the atom bomb as a “paper tiger”, something that looks more dangerous than it is. Mao meant that all governments depended on the support of the people, and they would never consent to using atomic weapons. The phrase was taken another way: no government would dare use such weapons for fear of provoking a response from the other side. This was the idea behind the doctrine of ‘mutually assured destruction’ during the Cold War, as the power and number of nuclear weapons intensified. Even then, the world came perilously close to disaster on more than one occasion.

4. “Well, he would, wouldn’t he?”

Mandy Rice-Davies, 1963

This ordinary retort marked an unlikely watershed in British social history. Marilyn (better known as Mandy) Rice-Davies was a model and dancer working in London’s Soho, where she met Christine Keeler and her friend and protector, Stephen Ward. A successful osteopath, Ward was well-known in high society, hosting parties and introducing girls like Keeler and Rice-Davies to his well-connected friends, including the Secretary of State for War John Profumo and the Conservative peer Lord Astor. A public scandal ensued when the truth of Ward’s parties was revealed, especially with reports that Keeler had slept both with Profumo and a Russian naval attaché, Eugene Ivanov, which made the affair a diplomatic furore.

Rice-Davies was a witness at Ward’s trial. It was widely held at the time that people in high society were trustworthy and honourable, incapable of the lewd behaviour associated with ‘lower’ classes. When it was put to Rice-Davies that Lord Astor denied her claim of an affair, the assumption was that his word was worth more than hers. Her cheeky response – “Well, he would, wouldn’t he?” – suggested that the aristocracy were no more honourable than anyone else. The remark caused a sensation.

5. “I am the greatest”

Cassius Clay, 1963

Muhammad Ali, who changed his name from Cassius Clay in 1964, was always much more than a boxer: he was a role model for young black people around the world and a major international celebrity, mixing his sporting triumphs with irrepressible charm and wit.

Boxing had long been a way for poor Americans to better themselves. Clay, who came from the segregated South, won the light heavyweight gold medal at the age of 18 at the 1960 Rome Olympics before turning professional and starting an immense career that saw him become world heavyweight champ three times. As well as a pugilist, though, Clay was a charismatic self-promoting poet always showing his gifts for trash talking. In 1963, shortly before announcing his conversion to Islam and his new name, he issued a record of rhythmically spoken poetry entitled I Am the Greatest.

Ali continued to describe himself proudly as ‘the Greatest’, but he put his reputation and career on the line, and even risked jail, by refusing to serve in the US Army in 1967 as the war in Vietnam raged. His case went to the Supreme Court and Ali became a symbol of growing American opposition to the war, and a figurehead of the civil rights movement. He was now a champion of the dispossessed as well as ‘the Greatest’ in the boxing ring.

6. “I have a dream”

Dr Martin Luther King Jr, 1963

Martin Luther King Jr’s iconic speech was delivered in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC, an enormous statue of the US president who had ended slavery in the United States. By the 1960s, however, true emancipation was still far off as African Americans faced entrenched legal discrimination and police violence. King, who had made his name leading protests against racial segregation, was speaking to a huge civil rights rally calling for jobs and fair treatment for America’s black population, but his speech went much further than that.

• Read more | How did the US civil rights movement influence Britain?

King’s style of oratory owed much to his background as a Baptist preacher and his imagery, of a dream in which black and white people lived in harmony and friendship – and where his children “will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character” – was in line with the visionary sermons that many of his listeners had heard in church. The power of his words went far beyond the 17 minutes that his speech took and the 250,000 people gathered on that day, 28 August 1963. They became not only a defining moment of the civil rights movement, but of US history.

7. “The banality of evil”

Hannah Arendt, 1963

In May 1960, Israel took the world by surprise when its secret service agents kidnapped and abducted a German living in Argentina who gave his name as Ricardo Klement. In fact, he was Adolf Eichmann, one of the key figures in the implementation of the ‘Final Solution’, the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe. He was put on a plane to Israel and in 1961 he faced a criminal trial in Jerusalem. Hannah Arendt, a Jewish German-American writer and academic, asked the New Yorker if she could cover the trial for them. They agreed.

In Arendt’s eyes, the bespectacled Eichmann, wearing a cheap suit instead of his Nazi uniform, seemed like any other middle-ranking office clerk; he could just as easily have been working for an insurance company or a bank. She coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to highlight the way evil can flourish not just by good people standing by, but by ordinary people in ordinary jobs carrying out instructions without ever questioning their morality.

Her analysis ran into a storm of controversy. Jews were unhappy at her criticisms of what she saw as a show trial by the State of Israel; more recently, Holocaust scholars have pointed out that the viciously antisemitic Eichmann was very far from being a small cog in the machine: he was a proactive and energetic enforcer of the Final Solution, most notably directing the mass murder of the Jewish population of Hungary.

However, Arendt’s idea that evil does not need supervillains, but merely enough ordinary people doing their ordinary jobs remains a powerful insight. She gave us the words to describe it.

8. “All you need is love”

The Beatles, 1967

The Beatles were at the height of their fame and influence by the 1967 ‘summer of love’. Pop music had developed into a young people’s lifestyle and outlook that their parents, of the wartime generation, found utterly bewildering.

The Beatles did not just produce hit records: they put forward a new philosophy, which overturned the older generation’s assumptions about behaviour, dress and morality. When their album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band appeared in May, it quickly took on cult status. A month later, the group unveiled a new song, ‘All You Need is Love’, as part of the first global live television link-up called Our World, which was watched by an audience of approximately 400 million.

The song had been purposely written with simple repeated lyrics to appeal to the international viewers, and so summarised the new attractive, easy-to-grasp philosophy in clear terms. As the song itself says, “It’s easy”. Older heads might point out that life needs a lot more than love, but in 1967 few young people were listening.

Pop music has been one of the defining cultural influences that mark the postwar world: it has overcome generational, social, political and cultural barriers with its infectious rhythms and simple messages. While ‘All You Need is Love’ may have always been an ideal, it has endured.

9. “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind”

Neil Armstrong, 1969

That, at any rate, is what Neil Armstrong meant to say when he stepped down from the lunar module onto the surface of the Moon on 20 July 1969. Either he slipped on his words, or they were obscured by a bleep in the transmission, because the version heard back on Earth did not have that crucial “a”. It did not seem to matter.

Armstrong was right: it was a giant leap, though at the time no one quite knew in what direction. Space exploration had excited people around the world since the Soviet Union’s Sputnik satellite in 1957 and putting a human being on the Moon had seemed the ultimate prize. Where was all this endeavour to go after that? Science fiction suggested a world of space voyages, but the reality was to be much closer to home. Space technology moved into the world of satellites, first for telecommunications and later for everything from television to meteorology and traffic management. Inevitably, the military potential of space was quickly recognised. The Moon missions opened space up as a further area of operation for the nations of the Earth, so Armstrong was right, even if he got his words wrong.

10. “There is no such thing as society”

Margaret Thatcher, 1987

The Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s first woman prime minister, ushered in a revolution. Her immediate aim was to resolve the economic problems into which the country had sunk in the 1970s, which she did by promoting a new philosophy based on free enterprise and the rolling-back of state control.

In an interview for Woman’s Own magazine, Thatcher outlined her belief that, ultimately, it is not for the government to resolve people’s problems; individuals and families must look after themselves and their neighbours. In that sense, she said, “There is no such thing as society”.

The phrase provoked a storm of controversy. Supporters applauded her emphasis on individuals, while opponents denounced what they saw as her uncaring attitude towards the Welfare State, which many regarded as the most significant change in 20th-century British society. The phrase encapsulated two completely different political philosophies: a belief in the power of the state as a force for good or as an enervating drain on the people’s energies.

11. “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

Ronald Reagan, 1987

The postwar Soviet Union seemed a menacing, repressive world, in the grip of its secret police and ruled by a set of grim-faced old men in coats, so the emergence in 1985 of Mikhail Gorbachev as general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party came as a pleasant surprise. Not only did he seem more human and approachable, but he was clearly open to a closer and warmer relationship with the west. Even Mrs Thatcher commented that she liked Mr Gorbachev: he was a man she could do business with.

Gorbachev embarked on a wholesale reordering of Soviet life and institutions, beginning with perestroika (restructuring) and notably glasnost (openness), encouraging people to speak openly and honestly about their lives, their past and even their government. Western countries sat up and took notice. Was it changing into a western-style democracy? Were the days of tanks rolling into eastern European capitals to crush liberation movements truly over?

• Read more | Did Ronald Reagan 'Make America Great Again'?

US president Ronald Reagan decided to test him. In 1987, the president gave a speech at the Berlin Wall, the most potent symbol of the Soviet Union’s hostile rejection of the west. He welcomed the changes Gorbachev was making, but called on him to take the most far-reaching step of all: “Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

No one really believed he would, but it was thought that it might force Gorbachev onto the defensive. What no one predicted was that only two years later a mass movement of people, taking their cue from Gorbachev’s glasnost policy and calling openly for freedom of speech and movement, would force communist governments from power.

When in May 1989 a journalist asked Gorbachev if the wall might come down, he replied, smilingly, “Why not?” By the end of the year, it had.

12. “Women’s rights are human rights and human rights are women’s rights”

Hillary Rodham Clinton, 1995

The feminist movement had used a shorter version of this phrase since the 1980s, but it entered the mainstream when Hillary Clinton, wife of American president Bill Clinton, spoke at a United Nations World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995.

The transformation of the position of women in society was one of the most striking changes to take place in the 20th century.  In Britain and the US, the century had begun with the celebrated campaign for women to have the right to vote, and by the end feminism had developed as a movement and philosophy that sought to transform human society along the lines of equality.

Clinton was an apt figure to give voice to the aim.  She was a lawyer who, in 1974, had been part of the Watergate investigation team that brought down President Richard Nixon.  But her husband’s own presidency meant that she had to perform what was essentially a ceremonial role. She could support Bill in his duties, but could she hold office herself?

As long as women’s rights continued to be regarded as a category on their own, it seemed that women would never be accepted as equals – hence her impassioned iteration that women’s rights are not just rights for women: they have always been basic human rights.

13. “You’re a wizard, Harry”

Robbie Coltrane (as Rubeus Hagrid), 2001

When JK Rowling’s debut novel Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was published in 1997, it was regarded as simply another imaginative children’s book from a first-time author. As word went round school playgrounds, however, the popularity of the series grew. Soon, crowds were gathering at bookshops to buy each new title as soon it appeared, along with Harry Potter audiobooks, videogames, tie-in toys and merchandise.

Then in 2001, the first of a highly successful series of Harry Potter feature films made its way on to the big screen. What had begun as a series of children’s books had become a global phenomenon, with the words “You’re a wizard, Harry” (spoken by Hagrid actor Robbie Coltrane in the first film adaptation) becoming part of cinematic history.

Hogwarts, Harry’s school of witchcraft and wizardry, is clearly a nostalgic throwback to the days of Britain’s famous private schools, with their uniforms, dormitories and special trains. But much of her message is more universal: a passionate defence of honesty and integrity against the dark forces of evil in the world, including those to be found in people who sit in authority. The formidable but kindly headmaster Albus Dumbledore is a sort of Old Testament prophet; the clash between Harry, whose parents gave their lives for him, and Voldemort (aka Tom Riddle), a boy who has given in to his dark side, is a modern stand-off between Jesus and Lucifer, the fallen angel.

Did Harry Potter come to embody a substitute religion in the secular post-Christian western world? Certainly, fundamentalist Christians denounced the books and forbade their children from reading them. We can be sure that historians will be looking closely at the Harry Potter phenomenon for many years to come.

14. “This is for everyone”

Tim Berners-Lee, 2012

One of the most significant moments during the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics was also one of the quietest. After a stunning display that charted rural Britain’s transformation into an industrial powerhouse came a dance sequence depicting a 21st-century house party, complete with a full-size replica of a suburban home at its centre.

Then, the house lifted up to reveal a middle-aged man sitting at his computer sending out a tweet: "This is for everyone.” The man was Tim Berners-Lee, and in 1989 he laid the foundations for what would become the World Wide Web.

The web transformed the modern world just as totally as the Victorian industrialists had. Computers had always been huge, complex objects, the preserve of scientists and governments; until fairly recently, the most sophisticated item that people carried around with them was a pocket calculator. What Berners-Lee did was to create a way that would connect computers with each other, anywhere in the world, whether they were in people’s bedrooms or in the headquarters of international agencies. Suddenly, ordinary people had access to pretty much anything they might want to see.

This was a democratic revolution as well as a technological one. As any government knows, access to information is power, and it was now in the hands of ordinary people everywhere. Tech companies grew from small gatherings of like-minded geeks into formidable multinational powers, able to face down governments. Of course, such power also brings responsibility, but Berners-Lee’s message at the Olympics was that the web should always be for everyone. A simple message – but a truly revolutionary one.

]]> Fascism? No thanks! Why Britain rejected extremism in the 1930s https://www.historyextra.com/membership/fascism-no-thanks-why-britain-rejected-extremism-in-the-1930s/ Mon, 16 Feb 2026 15:30:41 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/fascism-no-thanks-why-britain-rejected-extremism-in-the-1930s/ Extremism was on the march across continental Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. Yet Britons chose a different, more moderate, path. Alwyn Turner explores why the posturing and rants of would-be dictators largely fell on deaf ears between the wars “Is this the age of dictators?” asked veteran journalist Sir Sidney Low. He was writing in September 1923, the month in which a military coup brought Miguel Primo de Rivera to power in Spain. At the same time, Benito Mussolini was reinforcing his new dictatorship in Italy, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was shaping the nascent republic of Turkey, and disruptions – including those fomented by Hitler’s Nazis – were building to a climax in Germany. Taken together, these developments led Low to wonder whether the world might be witnessing “the general decline of parliamentary institutions”.

Over the years that followed, his comments were to become commonplace. By 1938, there was autocratic rule in more than a dozen European countries across the continent, from Portugal to Poland and beyond to the Soviet Union. Even in some countries that remained democracies, substantial anti-democratic elements were growing in power and influence: in the 1936 Belgian elections, the far right won nearly 20 per cent of the vote, while the Communist Party took 15 per cent in French elections that year.

In Britain, however, there was no equivalent body of support for extremism in the interwar years. There was, of course, the British Union of Fascists (BUF) under the leadership of Oswald Mosley – a Conservative MP who then sat as an independent before switching to Labour and eventually finding his way to fascism. But Mosley was never more than a peripheral figure. At its peak in mid-1934, the BUF briefly numbered around 45,000 members. Meanwhile, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) never got above 20,000 members in the 1930s. By comparison, the Labour Party claimed up to half a million members, and there were 6 million trade unionists. The CPGB’s best electoral showing came in the 1931 general election when it fielded 26 candidates, averaging fewer than 3,000 votes each – 0.3 per cent of the total – while Mosley’s New Party got 0.2 per cent. In 1935, the BUF didn’t even put up candidates. It’s not that Britain narrowly escaped the extremism that swept across Europe in the interwar years – it never came even vaguely close.

Safe across the water

There were multiple reasons why Britain didn’t succumb to the appeals of fascism or other extreme ideologies. There was the security of being an island, and the stability of a long existence as a nation within fixed borders. There was the fact that, horrific as the numbers of British fatalities were in the First World War, they were dwarfed by those of other combatant nations. Similarly, although the Great Depression brought hardship to many, Britain was not affected as badly as other countries.

There was also the nature of the Labour Party, committed to the parliamentary process, as were the trade unions. And indeed the nature of the Conservative Party under the One-Nation leadership of Stanley Baldwin – as well as the electoral system that made it so difficult for rival parties to emerge.

• Read more | When Mosley's fascists took on East End London and lost: the Battle of Cable Street explained

In his 1937 account of life in the industrial north, The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell made the suggestion that “cheap luxuries” kept the working class quiescent. “It is quite likely that fish-and-chips, art-silk stockings, tinned salmon, cut-price chocolate (five two-ounce bars for sixpence), the movies, the radio, strong tea, and the Football Pools have between them averted revolution,” he wrote. But low-level consumerism was not unique to Britain. If the country chose “to make the best of things”, it was surely because the national culture was already averse to radical disruption.

It’s relevant, for example, that this was the great era of voluntary associations. There had been working men’s social clubs in industrial towns and cities for decades, but numbers grew substantially in the aftermath of the First World War. By 1922, its diamond jubilee year, the Working Men’s Club and Institute Union could boast 2,300 affiliated clubs with more than a million members. The Women’s Institute, which was founded in Canada and had reached Britain during the war, grew in the 1930s to around 300,000 members. Rotary Clubs, founded in Chicago, had around 19,000 members, and the League of Nations Union more than 400,000. Perhaps most important of all was the British Legion, which merged various ex-servicemen’s groups in 1921. Within a decade, it had a membership of 300,000 – around one in 10 of those who had served in the forces.

Beyond these big networks, Britain nurtured a vast array of local societies and groups dedicated to single interests: photography, prison reform, amateur dramatics, vegetable growing, jazz records and a thousand other issues and hobbies. What they had in common, pointed out the novelist Phyllis Bentley, was a high level of self-regulation. “Each of these societies has a properly elected committee and chairman,” she wrote, “and conducts its business by means of an agenda, a proper procedure of moving and voting resolutions, an annual report and a balance sheet open to all members.” The British, she observed, were a people “unexcelled in the proper conduct of public business by entirely voluntary but strictly self-regulated methods”. This was the institutionalised form of Edmund Burke’s “little platoons”, a term coined by the philosopher and politician to express the importance of societal bonds formed at a local and family level.

There were also political clubs – some 2,000 Conservative, nearly 1,000 Liberal, the early stirrings of Labour – but it was the institutions that weren’t based on party that really mattered. The non-aligned status of the various societies allowed for diversity of opinion, and for finding common cause. The societies operated on the basis of cooperation and coalition. It was from voluntary societies and trade unions, argued Baldwin, that the people had learned “the elements and principles of a democracy” which “they will never let go”. Democratic practice was thus embedded in everyday life, far beyond politics.

Cultural caution

Indeed, there was a striking absence of politics in British social life, and even more so in cultural life. The cinema, for example, was regulated by the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC), a body whose only remit was not to offend and which approved nothing more provocative than resilience in the face of adversity.

The espousal of doctrines of revolution or free love were banned, as were “references to controversial politics”, including “relations between capital and labour”. So a proposed movie of Walter Greenwood’s Depression-era novel Love on the Dole was rejected by the BBFC for having “too much of the tragic and sordid side of poverty”. Permitted, however, was the comedy Off the Dole in which George Formby was “sacked” by the Labour Exchange after four years of not working, and which displayed nothing more contentious than the gentlest of political satire. (“A member of parliament is a man who gives your life for his country.”) Also banned by the BBFC was anything “calculated to wound the susceptibilities of foreign people”, as well as “the insistence on the inferiority of the coloured races” and “scenes calculated to inflame racial hatred”.

• Read more | The BBC begins: how a group of radio pioneers launched one of Britain's most famous institutions

It was a very British take on censorship, quite unlike that of most European countries. It wasn’t any particular political viewpoint that was banned, but politics as a whole. “We may take pride,” said Lord Tyrrell, president of the BBFC, in 1937, “in observing that there is not a single film in London which deals with any of the burning issues of the day.” The BBFC had been established – and was still run – by the industry itself and, although its writ was never challenged, it had no statutory authority. This system of self-regulation was, acknowledged Labour politician Herbert Morrison, “a curious arrangement” but, he added, “The British have a very great habit of making curious arrangements that work very well.” In any event, it was surely preferable to the intense government control seen in Germany under Joseph Goebbels, or in Russia, where the head of the Soviet film industry, Boris Shumyatsky, was executed as a traitor in 1938 for not doing his job well enough.

Reithian values

An equally curious arrangement governed the BBC, founded in 1922, which operated first as a private company and then as a public-service corporation under royal charter. It had a monopoly on radio broadcasting in Britain and became the most significant cultural institution in the country. By the end of the 1920s there were 3 million radio licences, 9 million by the end of the thirties – virtually every household in the country had a radio. It was a little odd, though. Even in its early commercial days, the BBC was never a conventional operation that responded to audience demand. Nor did it ever become an organ of government. Instead, general manager (later director-general) John Reith created his own vision of public service broadcasting, and mostly resisted external pressure from those who wished to shape this new medium.

There were restrictions, of course. Like the cinema, radio was not a place for disruption. The government, explained Reith, had given “an explicit instruction to avoid anything in the nature of religious, political or industrial controversy”. There wasn’t even a great deal of news. The newspaper industry, fearful of being made redundant, successfully lobbied the government to ensure that the first radio bulletin of the day wasn’t broadcast until 7pm, so that it wouldn’t harm sales of morning or evening titles.

That curfew was broken – never to return – during the nine-day General Strike of 1926, when independent newspaper production was suspended and the radio became the chief source of news for many. During the dispute, Reith complained about the government – “I do not think they treat me altogether fairly,” he wrote in his diary – but he strove to keep coverage calm and detached. Even in this moment of national crisis, the BBC was not a propaganda station – largely because Baldwin overruled those in his cabinet (most notably Winston Churchill) who wanted to commandeer the airwaves.

More broadly, as political coverage expanded, the BBC allowed for a variety of voices but had a clear bias towards parliamentary democracy: communists and fascists were seldom heard on the radio. It was ecumenical but definitely mainstream. So too was its approach to religion. Despite his own Presbyterian faith, Reith believed that religious broadcasting should be based on “a non-sectarian Christianity, confined, in respect of doctrine, to those simplest essentials to which all Christians of the west can adhere”.

With only one national channel, augmented in most regions by a local station, the intention was to occupy a shared middle ground. As with the cinema, there was no wish to ruffle feathers. And, also like the cinema, the BBC was essentially self-regulating.

For other cultural forms, there existed a patchwork of censorship that had evolved over generations without any sense of logic or coherence. The London stage was under the tight control of the Lord Chamberlain, while variety theatres were overseen by local councils. Books and exhibitions required no prior approval but were subject to the Obscene Publications Act. The Post Office was empowered to intercept mail, and customs officers to seize material brought in from abroad.

None of this was draconian. It simply smothered: a comfort blanket that insulated against conflict. The resultant lack of cultural engagement with burning political issues on stage, screen and radio was part of the reason why the country felt – and was – so much more stable in the 1930s than most of Europe. Culture in Britain was far quieter than in its neighbours.

There was something more that underpinned these cultural manifestations: a conviction that dictatorship ran against the grain of the nation. “Autocracy is abhorrent to the British mind,” wrote a columnist in the West Sussex Gazette in 1933, “and the kind we see in operation in Germany seems to us almost incredible.” The totalitarian state, with its intrusion into private life, offended a culture that had always prided itself on privacy and independence; somehow, it all looked so alien.

The leader-worship accorded to Hitler, Stalin and their ilk – the ubiquity of their images on posters, placards and public portraits – felt wrong. That role was already taken by the monarchy, whose iconography was woven into the social fabric, from the national anthem to banknotes and coins, postage stamps and pillar boxes. The words “an English Hitler”, reflected novelist Louis Golding in 1931, were “comically contradictory of each other”. (Which didn’t stop people from trying them out: the previous year, Labour minister Arthur Greenwood had used precisely that phrase to describe Winston Churchill.)

No need to get shirty

Equally alien, if not downright silly, were fascism’s quasi-military uniforms – all those monochrome shirts. “The number of nations that may be led to salvation, generally an undemocratic salvation, need to be limited only by the number of colours that shirts may be dyed,” mocked the Roscommon Herald. They became a standing joke in the literature of the time. There were Green Shirts in John Buchan’s 1935 novel The House of the Four Winds and again in Richmal Compton’s William the Dictator, White Shirts in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop (both 1938), and unspecified Imperial Shirts in Agatha Christie’s One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (1940).

Best of all, in his 1938 novel The Code of the Woosters, PG Wodehouse introduced Roderick Spode, a parody of Oswald Mosley who leads the Black Shorts. As Gussie Fink-Nottle explains: “There were no shirts left.” In the same book, Wodehouse ridiculed “those pictures in the papers of dictators with tilted chins and blazing eyes, inflaming the populace with fiery words”.

That was another part of the problem with such figures: the posturing and the bragging rants looked out of place in a British context, in the same way that fire-and-brimstone evangelicalism doesn’t work in a home counties accent. When Mosley launched the British Union of Fascists, he replaced his conventional tweeds and suits with a black polo-neck sweater tucked into black trousers, held up by a wide black leather belt, and his onstage persona adopted a more declamatory tone and exaggerated arm gestures. But he looked unconvincing, as though he was playing a dictator in an amateur dramatics society show.

If there was a single cultural symbol of Britain’s instinctive distrust of the dictator, it was perhaps ‘The Lambeth Walk’ – the song, and accompanying dance, that swept the country in 1938. A highlight of the musical Me and My Girl it was a simple and instantly catchy tune that cried out to be whistled cheerily by postmen and plumbers. The lyrics were even simpler, notable for the shout of “Oi!” and for the happy-go-lucky bridge: “Everything free and easy; do as you darn well pleasey.”

The song seemed to speak of a people free from an overbearing state – an anomaly in an increasingly authoritarian world. And it was embraced across the whole of society – danced, according to Mass Observation reports, “in Mayfair ballrooms, suburban dance halls, cockney parties and village hops”.

• Read more | From Mosley to the summer riots of 2024: the opportunistic evolution of Britain’s far right

Some 350,000 copies of the sheet music for ‘The Lambeth Walk’ were sold in Britain in its first year, and it was exported successfully, too. It was recorded by dozens of artists including American bandleaders Artie Shaw and Duke Ellington, as well as Europe’s greatest jazz group, the Quintet of the Hot Club of France. As the continent lurched towards another conflict in the year of Munich and the idea of “peace for our time” proved illusory, The Times predicted that the song would “be the ‘Tipperary’ of the next world war”.

In Nazi Germany, however, the song encountered stiff opposition. It was banned at the Shrovetide Carnival festivities in Munich and at the University of Heidelberg – where Joseph Goebbels had been awarded his PhD – and Hermann Göring reportedly forbade Luftwaffe bands from playing it. “This is degenerate music and the people who dance it are also degenerate,” thundered Der SA-Mann, newspaper of the Brownshirts.

From a British perspective, this was a fundamental clash of cultures and values. “There is nothing free and easy in Nazi Germany,” said the Liverpool Echo. “‘The Lambeth Walk’ must seem out of place in the land of the goose step.”

If that comparison seems a little fanciful – perhaps trivial – it made sense at the time. And even Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour Party, drew exactly the same conclusion. “I understand that Hitler regards the Lambeth Walk as too democratic a dance for Germany,” he said. “All they can do there is the goose step.”

Alwyn Turner is senior lecturer in cultural and literary history at the University of Chichester. His new book is A Shellshocked Nation: Britain Between the Wars (Profile, January 2026)

This article was first published in the February 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine

]]> Did Hitler have sexual relations with Eva Braun? What my research reveals about the Führer's love life https://www.historyextra.com/membership/did-hitler-have-sexual-relations-with-eva-braun-what-my-research-reveals-about-the-fuhrers-love-life/ Sun, 25 Jan 2026 16:00:59 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/did-hitler-have-sexual-relations-with-eva-braun-what-my-research-reveals-about-the-fuhrers-love-life/ Last year, the results of a groundbreaking study into Adolf Hitler’s DNA were revealed to the world. The project’s senior historical consultant, Alex J Kay, looks at what the findings might be able to tell us about the Führer’s relationship with Eva Braun and the other women in his life In November 2025, I was lead historian on the television documentary Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator, which revealed the results of a world-first analysis of Adolf Hitler’s DNA. The results – as explained by the project’s lead geneticist, Turi King – revealed that Hitler had a disorder known as Kallmann syndrome. Among other things, this condition can result in impaired testosterone production, low libido, underdeveloped reproductive features and, by extension, a disrupted reproductive function.

The revelation that Hitler had Kallmann syndrome is intriguing because of the likely implications for his private life. This finding strongly suggests a causal relationship between Hitler’s genetic make-up and particular facets of his behaviour. It complements what we already knew about this part of Hitler’s biography, and it sheds light on aspects of his life that we could previously only speculate about.

Born in provincial Austria in 1889, Hitler had a very traumatic childhood, experiencing abuse at the hands of his father and losing four out of five siblings as well as both parents by the time he turned 19. He later wrote in his autobiographical manifesto Mein Kampf that his mother’s death had been “a dreadful blow, particularly for me”.

The family doctor, Eduard Bloch, subsequently remarked: “While [Hitler] was not a ‘mother’s boy’ in the usual sense, I have never witnessed a closer attachment.” Hitler was at his mother’s bedside when she passed away. Dr Bloch later observed: “In all my career, I have never seen anyone so prostrate with grief as Adolf Hitler.” Experiencing such loss during his formative years would have had a lasting impact on Hitler’s character.

A portrait of adolescence

As we have known since the medical file resurfaced at an auction in 2010, a physical examination during Hitler’s time in Landsberg prison in 1923, following his arrest for the failed Munich putsch that November, revealed that he had “right-sided cryptorchidism” – that is, an undescended testicle.

This physical abnormality might help to explain the account given by Hitler’s closest (and perhaps only) friend during his adolescence, August Kubizek. While living in Vienna, Hitler and Kubizek shared a room from February to July 1908. Noting Hitler’s “obvious indifference to the opposite sex”, his “strict monk-like asceticism” and the fact that he “refrained from masturbation”, Kubizek observed: “my friend undoubtedly found favour with the opposite sex although, to my amazement, he never took advantage of it”.

Commenting on the entirety of their friendship from the autumn of 1905 (not 1904, as Kubizek claimed), when they met at the opera in Linz, to the summer of 1908, when their time together in Vienna came to an end, Kubizek concluded: “I think I can say with certainty: Adolf never met a girl, either in Linz or Vienna, who actually gave herself to him.” None of the accounts of Hitler’s remaining years in the Austrian capital suggests anything changed in this regard.

• Read more | “We analysed Hitler’s DNA – and what we discovered made us gasp”

Tellingly, one of Hitler’s closest confidants during the 1920s and 1930s, Ernst Hanfstaengl, later wrote:

“I can never recall having seen him in a bathing costume, nor had anyone else. A story, probably authentic, was frequently told that Hitler’s old army comrades, who had seen him in the wash-house, had noted that his genital organs were almost freakishly underdeveloped, and he doubtless had some sense of shame about displaying himself. It seemed to me that this must all be part of the underlying complex in his physical relations, which was compensated for by the terrifying urge for domination expressed in the field of politics.”

According to the historian Ian Kershaw, author of the definitive biography of the Nazi leader: “Kubizek’s account, together with the language Hitler himself used in Mein Kampf, does point at the least to an acutely disturbed and repressed sexual development.” The German historian Peter Longerich, in his own biography of Hitler, goes one step further: “In view of Hitler’s personality, it seems altogether plausible that his life was asexual: any intimate relationship would simply have been incompatible with his arrested emotional development with regard to other people and with his self-perception as a public figure through and through with an extraordinary historic mission.”

No room for a wife

Rumours that Hitler had been infected with syphilis by a Jewish prostitute were without foundation. Medical tests in 1940 showed that Hitler had not suffered from syphilis. Although the serological tests carried out in 1940 did not exclude neurosyphilis, recent medical research has concluded that the suggestion that Hitler may have had neurosyphilis is unsustainable. The discovery that Hitler had Kallmann syndrome might thus be the key to explaining his seemingly “disturbed and repressed sexual development”. As Hanfstaengl observed, Hitler must have been extremely self-conscious about his body and, for this reason, reluctant to engage in relations of an intimate or sexual nature – and perhaps even uninterested in that side of life.

This fact would help to explain Hitler’s absolute devotion to politics to the almost complete exclusion of any kind of private life. Such devotion was exceptional among Nazi leaders. All other senior Nazis – Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels, Martin Bormann, Rudolf Hess, Albert Speer, and so on – had wives and children; some even had extramarital affairs.

Ian Kershaw once wrote: “There was no ‘private life’ for Hitler. Of course, he could enjoy his escapist films, his daily walk to the Tea-House at the Berghof, his time in his alpine idyll far from government ministries in Berlin. But these were empty routines. There was no retreat to a sphere outside the political, to a deeper existence which conditioned his public reflexes.”

The identification and testing of Hitler’s DNA, combined with the historical facts already available to us, may now explain why.

The fact that Hitler had Kallmann syndrome surely played a part in his renunciation of any kind of private life or intimate relationships. According to Christa Schroeder, who served as one of Hitler’s secretaries for the entirety of his 12 years in power: “Undoubtedly Hitler enjoyed the company of beautiful women and was inspired by them. He used eroticism, but not sex. Because of the great objective he had set himself and to which he was totally committed, sexual gratification occurred mentally.”

Hitler always claimed that his life was devoted to Germany, so that there was no room in it for a wife. It seems this claim might, at least in part, have been a way of covering up his aversion to intimate relationships, and that his genes may have played a bigger part in his decision not to marry and have children than he was willing to admit.

• Read more | “We need to understand the Nazis as human beings”: Richard J Evans on the motivations of Hitler’s followers

"Saturated with jealousy"

It is with two women that Hitler is most closely associated: Geli Raubal and Eva Braun. Geli, born in 1908 (and thus 19 years younger than Hitler), was the daughter of Hitler’s half-sister, Angela Raubal. Geli’s father died two years after her birth, and Hitler became her legal guardian in 1923. Six years later, Geli moved into Hitler’s nine-room apartment in Munich.

Hitler was overbearing and jealously possessive of his half-niece. He took her everywhere with him, and if she went out alone, she was chaperoned and had to be home early. To all intents and purposes, Geli was a prisoner. And she resented it bitterly.

On 18 September 1931, Geli shot and killed herself in the apartment, using Hitler’s own pistol. According to Ian Kershaw, his emotional relationship with Geli was “more intense than any other human relationship he had before or after”. Anni Winter, Hitler’s housekeeper in Munich from 1929 to 1945, summed it up, according to Christa Schroeder, as “a platonic love saturated with jealousy”.

In the autumn of 1929, the same year that Geli Raubal moved into his Munich apartment, Hitler first met Eva Braun at the Munich studio of his personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, where she worked as an assistant and, later, as a photographer herself. Eva, born in 1912, was nearly 23 years younger than Hitler.

The two began spending more time together from early 1932, after several months had passed since Geli Raubal’s suicide. One of Hitler’s closest political associates, Franz Xaver Schwarz – who had joined the Nazi Party in 1922, taken part in the failed Munich putsch the following November, and then served as treasurer of the Nazi Party from 1925 to 1945 – told Allied officers in July 1945 that Hitler’s relationship with Eva Braun since 1931 had been “platonic”.

Heike Görtemaker, the biographer of Eva Braun, is right to point out that Schwarz “had absolutely no reason to reveal anything about Hitler’s carefully concealed private life to his American interrogators”. However, many other people who spent years in close proximity to Hitler said the same as Schwarz. Herbert Döhring, Hitler’s caretaker at the Berghof for eight years, claimed that there was never any evidence that the two had sex.

The aforementioned Christa Schroeder insisted in her memoir that “Hitler was not the lover of Eva Braun”. Heinrich Hoffmann, who introduced Hitler – “a personally modest and intensely shy person” – to Eva Braun, wrote in his memoir that she “became the constant companion of his leisure hours and, to the best of my knowledge, that was all there was to it”. He added: “there never was any love story”.

While physical intimacy between them cannot be ruled out entirely, all available evidence suggests that Hitler’s relationship with Eva Braun was not sexual. In Hitler’s Munich apartment, his suite of rooms in the Reich Chancellery, at the Berghof and, later, in his Berlin bunker, Eva Braun always had her own separate bedroom.

Keeping secrets

One disturbing fact is worth pointing out here: Geli Raubal was not the only woman intimately associated with Hitler to attempt, or die by, suicide. His brief flirtation with Maria ‘Mimi’ Reiter, born in 1909 (and thus 20 years younger than Hitler), began in the autumn of 1926 when they met in Berchtesgaden. According to Kershaw, Hitler’s letters to her “were affectionate, though in a fatherly, patronising fashion”. Their friendship ended after a few months when Hitler broke off contact. Mimi Reiter unsuccessfully attempted to hang herself the following year.

During her relationship with Hitler, Eva Braun attempted suicide not once but twice, in November 1932 and May 1935 (before finally killing herself, alongside Hitler, in the Berlin bunker on 30 April 1945 – less than 40 hours after they had married). A few months after the second suicide attempt, she and her sister Gretl moved into a house that Hoffmann had bought for them on Hitler’s instructions. By the following year, Eva Braun had become a member of the Berghof inner circle around Hitler.

• Read more | The real Unity Mitford: meet the high society British Nazi who was rumoured to have had Hitler's child

Nonetheless, whatever the nature of their relationship, most German people did not know about it until after the war. She was only once caught on camera with Hitler in public, when she sat directly behind him during the women’s skating competition at the 1936 Winter Olympics. Otherwise, Hitler never allowed her to be seen in public with him.

Christa Schroeder may have succeeded in explaining both the longevity and Hitler’s true motivation in entering into his long-term companionship with Eva Braun when she wrote that “Hitler as a politician could not afford a second suicide of a young woman in his close circle… This protected him against future suicide attempts and was also a shield against all his other ardent female admirers”.

Though he was, by all accounts, fond of Mimi Reiter, Geli Raubal and Eva Braun (as well as other women) in his own way, they were all much younger women whom Hitler could – and did – dominate.

Heinrich Hoffmann’s assessment of Hitler's view of Eva Braun likely applied to all those women with whom he formed some sort of attachment: “To him, she was just an attractive little thing, in whom, in spite of her inconsequential and feather-brained outlook – or perhaps just because of it – he found the type of relaxation and repose he sought.” Christa Schroeder concludes for all these relationships that “Hitler appears to have kept his love life platonic throughout”.

In his own account, August Kubizek leaves the reader in no doubt as to his belief that Hitler was a pronounced misogynist. According to Kershaw: “Probably, he was frightened of women – certainly of their sexuality.”

Alex J Kay is a reader in modern history at the University of Potsdam. He recently served as the senior historical consultant and co-lead on the Channel 4 and Blink Films documentary Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator.

Alex J Kay and geneticist Turi King spoke to Matt Elton on the HistoryExtra podcast about their involvement in the DNA research. Listen to the full conversation.

]]> She defied the Nazis and paid the ultimate price: why I'm in awe of Sophie Scholl's courage https://www.historyextra.com/membership/she-defied-the-nazis-and-paid-the-ultimate-price-why-im-in-awe-of-sophie-scholls-courage/ Wed, 31 Dec 2025 15:00:01 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/she-defied-the-nazis-and-paid-the-ultimate-price-why-im-in-awe-of-sophie-scholls-courage/ Novelist Simon Scarrow chooses Sophie Scholl as his history hero In profile

Sophie Scholl was a German student and political activist in the White Rose, a non-violent resistance group opposed to Hitler. After being observed distributing anti-Nazi flyers at her university, Sophie, her brother Hans and their friend Christoph Probst were found guilty of treason and executed by guillotine; she was just 21.

When did you first hear about Sophie Scholl?

While I was doing research for my Nazi-era novels about a fictional German police detective. I came across the White Rose resistance movement, and that led me to Sophie.

What kind of woman was she?

First and foremost, she was an incredibly brave person – as was her brother Hans [co-founder of the White Rose]. She had a huge amount of integrity and wisdom for someone of her age, and understood what they were up against in opposing the Third Reich. I actually consider her a far more impressive figure than someone like Wilhelm Canaris [the German admiral and military intelligence chief executed for treason just before the end of the war], who was a Nazi for a long time before deciding that he wasn’t.

What made her a hero?

First, her realisation that she and her fellow White Rose activists were involved in a life-and-death struggle for the soul of Germany. Most students in Nazi Germany did themselves no good in terms of historical reputation – after all, they led the infamous Nazi book burnings. Sophie was one of a tiny minority of students who stood up to be counted. Second, her diehard courage. She pursued her anti-Nazi activism regardless of the consequences, and died a hero. If only there had been more like her in Germany at that time.

• Read more | Simon Schama on British history if Hitler had beaten Churchill: "The Holocaust would have happened here"

What was her finest hour?

Her refusal to flinch under interrogation or in the courtroom when she and fellow White Rose activists were found guilty of treason and sentenced to death by a Nazi judge, Roland Freisler. Her executioner, Johann Reichhart, who lived until the 1970s, later said that Sophie and her co-defendants were among the bravest people he’d ever put to death.

Is there anything that you don’t particularly admire about her?

I struggle to understand why she became ever more blasé in the way she resisted the Third Reich, openly distributing anti-Nazi leaflets around her university despite knowing the fatal consequences of her actions. By all means oppose the Nazi regime, but do so in the most effective way – and that surely means staying alive. Perhaps she was just resigned to the inevitable?

Can you see any parallels between her life and yours?

No. She was infinitely wiser, smarter and braver than I was at her age. However, I can see parallels between her and Greta Thunberg. If Greta had been around [during the Second World War], I think they would have got on like a house on fire.

What would you say to her if you could meet her now?

I’d ask if she ever considered not making a martyr of herself, instead using greater subterfuge in her fight against the regime.

Simon Scarrow is a British author known for his historical fiction. His latest paperback, A Death in Berlin (Headline), is out now

This article was first published in the January 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine

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