HistoryExtrahttps://www.historyextra.comHome of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast2026-10-21T14:54:37.000Zhourly12000-01-01T12:00+00:00The Nazis fell in love with the Bayeux Tapestry – and there's a dark reason whyhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/why-the-nazis-fell-in-love-with-the-bayeux-tapestry/2026-10-21T13:30:05.000ZOn 1 August 1944, two SS officers drove a pair of trucks into the heart of Nazi-occupied Paris, and headed straight for the Louvre. These men were on a top-secret mission – one assigned to them by Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the SS and one of the most powerful men in the Third Reich.
Himmler had tasked the two men with descending into the bowels of the world-famous art museum, seizing the Bayeux Tapestry and spiriting it away to a “safe place” far from the grasp of the Allies’ rapidly advancing armies.
After 15 years as the head of one of the most feared paramilitary organisations in history, Himmler was used to getting his own way. Yet in this case he was to be disappointed. A few days earlier, a group of local resistance fighters – tipped off by the codebreakers of Bletchley Park – had learned of the SS men’s mission and rushed to the Louvre to protect the iconic embroidery. Warned at the last minute that any attempt to ‘liberate’ the tapestry would be met with a hail of bullets, the SS officers gave up on their mission.
The Nazi proclivity for buying, extorting and confiscating Europe’s greatest artworks is well documented. But there was more to Himmler’s desire to seize the Bayeux Tapestry than an acquisitive lust for one of France’s foremost cultural treasures. In the celebrated images of Norman knights putting Anglo-Saxon foot soldiers to the sword he saw evidence of medieval Germanic supremacy.
The Nazi fascination with the Bayeux Tapestry can, perhaps, be traced back to 1 July 1935 when Himmler – along with fellow Nazi ideologues Richard Walther Darré and Herman Wirth – created Ahnenerbe, the Society for the Study of Germanic Heritage. Ahnenerbe was founded to promote archaeological investigations of sites that could be associated with early Germanic settlement, and to study, in situ, works related to the history of the Aryan race. It wasn’t long before its leading lights had turned their attention to the celebrated 11th-century embroidery depicting the Norman conquest of England in 1066.
The French had claimed the Bayeux Tapestry as a national historical monument since the early 1700s, but the Nazi regime had an alternative theory. In July 1939, a memo written by Franz Altheim, professor of classical philology at Frankfurt University, arrived on the desk of Wolfram Sievers, Ahnenerbe’s general manager. It proposed that a detailed examination of the Bayeux Tapestry would prove that the Normans who conquered England were, in reality, Vikings – and, by extension, Germanic. The idea that they were French, Altheim argued, was based on a 200-year-old lie. At the bottom of his note he wrote: “I emphasise the importance of this study.”
In July 1939, when Altheim penned his memo, the idea of a team of ardent Nazis poring over one of the most iconic artefacts in French history in an attempt to establish its Germanic origins would have been anathema to the people of France. But the fall of their nation to German forces in June 1940 rendered their opinions all but irrelevant.
And so, in the aftermath of the French surrender, Dr Herbert Jankuhn, professor of Viking archaeology at Rostock University – and a loyal Nazi – was appointed to head a team of experts tasked with studying the artefact in the northern French town of Bayeux. Jankuhn offered a clue as to what he hoped to achieve when declaring: “For general Germanic studies, the Tapestry’s visual representations, through the recording of Germanic legends and traditions, provides a very valuable source for this early period.”
Photographic evidence
Jankuhn’s first task as leader of Special Assignment Bayeux was to study the hanging, and gather information so that further studies could be carried out by research scholars after the embroidery had been moved to safe wartime storage. The ultimate aim was to produce a multi-volume publication of their findings, featuring a photographic replica of the tapestry. By examining representations of everything from boats and weapons to costumes, they would provide irrefutable scientific evidence that the tapestry was a testament to Germanic hegemony in early medieval Europe.
Jankuhn couldn’t complete such a weighty undertaking alone. He was accompanied by Dr Karl Schlabow, textile expert and head of the Germanic Costume Museum in Neumünster, whose job it was to scrutinise the fabric and take careful measurements. Rolf Alber, photographer and war reporter, was to shoot new images of the tapestry, in both black-and-white and colour. Herbert Jeschke, an artist from Berlin, was the only member of the Bayeux team who wasn’t a member of the Nazi party or the SS. His task was to create a series of accurate, full-size drawings and watercolours of details from the Bayeux Tapestry, under Jankuhn’s guidance.
First, though, they had to gain access to the embroidery – and that would prove surprisingly problematic. In September 1939, with war clouds gathering, the French authorities had rolled it up on a bobbin, placed it in a padded, zinc-lined wooden case and deposited it in a concrete bunker in the basement of Bayeux’s Hôtel du Doyen.
Since the fall of France, German officers had peppered Bayeux’s authorities with requests to see the tapestry – a process that meant repeatedly manhandling the fragile, 900-year-old artefact. The French were reluctant to allow this to continue and, in a classic delaying tactic, began insisting that all permissions to view the tapestry be signed by the proper authorities in Paris. As a result, following their arrival in Bayeux on 8 June 1941, Jankuhn and his team would have to wait days before beginning their work.
At first, they examined the embroidery in the Hôtel du Doyen’s Bishops’ Gallery – but this entailed unrolling and rolling the tapestry every day. So, on 23 June, it was moved in a truck – accompanied by Rene Falue (the tapestry’s official guardian), three French customs officials and a lone German policeman – to the Monastery of St Martin at Mondaye, five miles south of Bayeux, where a large section could be left unrolled.
Summoned to fight
Working seven days a week, Jankuhn’s team set about studying, drawing and photographing all 70 metres of the embroidery. They hit a stumbling block on 29 June, when Alber returned to military service. A replacement photographer, Ursula Uhland, was summoned but, because women weren’t allowed in the monastery’s cloister, the tapestry had to be transported to its public gallery.
Despite this setback, Jeschke had completed his sketches by the end of July, and the project’s last week was taken up with Uhland’s work and with shooting propaganda films for Wochenschau, a newsreel series released in the cinemas.
On 1 August, the tapestry was returned to its concrete bunker in Bayeux. A few days later it was moved again – to the Château de Sourches, some 100 miles south of Bayeux, where it joined treasures from the Louvre.
The first stage of Special Assignment Bayeux may have come to an end, but the Nazi obsession with the Bayeux Tapestry was showing no signs of abating. Dr Hermann Bunjes, head of the German Art Historical Institute in Paris, now became the project’s guiding spirit, assembling a group of academics to bring the multi-volume book on the artefact to fruition.
They set about comparing Jeschke’s drawings with Germanic and Viking artefacts in museums, and considered the photographs taken by Uhland and Alber. They envisaged a book that would present essays on the past scholarship of the embroidery, its physical details, its historical authority, its significance for the history of culture. The book would also contain a study of the fabric and embroidery, and an analysis of its material and colour.
One study ‘proved’ the early Germanic origin of the wooden houses depicted; another emphasised the similarity of English and Norman boats to Viking ships.
All of this was undertaken with one overriding ambition: to prove that the Normans were still true, untainted Vikings – representatives of the pure Nordic Aryan race.
Herbert Jankuhn had little doubt that Special Assignment Bayeux had achieved just that. “The Bayeux Tapestry is not only a king’s saga of purely Germanic imprint, but also constitutes the documentary justification of William’s claim to England,” he declared in December 1942. “His actions appear to us… as the execution of his given right and the punishment of unforgiveable perjury and unfaithfulness according to the Germanic viewpoint. The tapestry not only exudes genuine Germanic joy in the tradition of heroic deeds, but also the statesmanlike desire to justify the campaign in England as a legal operation and political necessity.” Propaganda magazines agreed wholeheartedly, running articles that eulogised the tapestry’s celebration of “the joy of the Germanic tradition of great acts of war”.
In short, Special Assignment Bayeux was to reclaim the tapestry as a perfect fit with Nazi pan-Germanic ideology, since it bore witness to the early unification of the Germanic cultures of Scandinavia, Normandy and England. It would also serve as a precedent for the Nazis’ desire to recreate Germania, a homeland for all Germanic peoples.
Glorious warfare
This sentiment would certainly have struck a chord with Heinrich Himmler, who was fascinated by the Bayeux Tapestry’s imagery of medieval knights and glorious warfare. Over Christmas 1942, the head of the SS was presented with a bound volume of photos and drawings of the embroidery – a gift that delighted him so much that he sent a thank-you note to Wolfram Sievers in which he noted “the significance that this Bayeux Tapestry has for our glorious and culturally rich German history”.
The Allied invasion of western Europe on 6 June 1944 merely sharpened Himmler’s desire to secure the tapestry for the Third Reich. His fear that it would fall into enemy hands became apparent on 27 June, when the Gestapo moved the embroidery – without notice and despite local French protest – from Sourches to the basement of the Louvre. This would be followed, little more than a month later, by the two SS officers’ attempt to spirit the embroidery away to a “safe place”, only to be thwarted by fast-acting resistance fighters.
What had been Himmler’s intentions when he ordered the tapestry moved from Paris? What would he have considered a “safe place” in June 1944? One possibility is Wewelsburg Castle in central Germany, which had been chosen by Himmler as the location for his training centre, the home of the cult of the SS – a place where officers were taught how to recreate the lost world of the ‘Nordic race’.
Obsessed with the idea that the SS was a revival of the medieval Teutonic knights, Himmler imagined the castle as the home of modern Nazi Knights of the Round Table. The crypt, designed to hold the ashes of SS leaders, was named Valhalla. Himmler installed his own collection of ancient and medieval weapons in the castle, and indicated he wanted tapestries hung on the walls. This would have been an apt location for the Bayeux Tapestry, which he considered a great testament to an earlier Germanic-Nordic-Aryan triumph.
If Wewelsburg Castle was a safe place in June 1944, it certainly didn’t remain so. On 31 March 1945, with US forces closing in, Himmler ordered the castle dynamited, along with its contents.
Fortunately, the Allies had already found the Bayeux Tapestry safe in its temporary home in the basement of the Louvre. On 2 March 1945, after going on display in an exhibition in the art museum, it was returned to Bayeux.
Were the Nazis wrong to attempt to divine a Viking presence in the Bayeux Tapestry? No. It has long been accepted that the Scandinavian influence on both English and Norman societies was significant – seen, for example, in ships, ship-building tools and some decorative elements. This influence can be traced back to the Viking occupation of vast swathes of England (the so-called Danelaw), and the ceding of what became Normandy to the Vikings in 911.
All three groups – English, Normans and Scandinavians – may be considered, to some extent, Germanic. But surely Ahnenerbe would have had finally to admit that, even if the Normans were still Vikings in 1066, they were French-speaking ones.
Shirley Ann Brown is professor emerita of art history at York University, Toronto, a member of the Bayeux Tapestry Advisory Committee, and author of The Bayeux Tapestry: A Sourcebook
This article was first published in the July 2018 edition of BBC History Magazine
]]>Hitler ordered my father’s death – but an SS general spared his lifehttps://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/george-lascelles-harewood-gottlob-berger-colditz-ww2/2026-09-27T20:00:06.000ZIt 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.
- Listen | Ben Macintyre discusses his book Escape from Colditz
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.
- Read more | The Nuremberg Trials: the real history behind the post-WW2 tribunal
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.
- Read more | I’ve just been inside a Nazi monster’s mansion – and what I found there was deeply haunting
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)
]]>In 1944, Hitler threatened London with a new "wonder weapon". How did resistance fighters race to stop him?https://www.historyextra.com/membership/in-1944-hitler-threatened-london-with-a-new-wonder-weapon-how-did-resistance-fighters-race-to-stop-him/2026-09-20T14:30:46.000ZThere are moments in historical research when the past suddenly ceases to feel distant. You can spend years reading documents in archives, following footnotes, studying maps and aerial photographs. Then one day you find yourself standing in the mud near a lake in eastern Europe, and realise that history happened right here.
During the Second World War, the lake in question was still a meadow, given the codename Motyl (‘Butterfly’). Eight decades later, the track I took to that spot in southern Poland was deeply rutted after recent rain, and I wondered whether my hire car was about to disappear into the mud altogether.
There were earthworks half-hidden by trees and, in the far distance, the Carpathian Mountains loomed under a grey sky. Nothing about the place obviously suggested that it had witnessed one of the most audacious secret missions of the conflict.
Yet it was from this remote spot that, in the summer of 1944, a RAF Dakota aircraft landed in darkness to pick up a cargo so important that Winston Churchill himself had taken a personal interest in the operation.
That cargo was a V-2 rocket.
The tale at the heart of my new book, Stealing Hitler’s Rocket, is one of those extraordinary wartime episodes that sounds almost too cinematic to be true. It features secret laboratories, daring flights into occupied territory, coded messages, hidden airstrips, brilliant scientists, terrified villagers, and one of the greatest intelligence coups of the entire war. Yet despite its importance, it remains astonishingly little known outside Poland.
Most British adults know broadly what the V-2 was: Hitler’s terrifying ‘revenge weapon’, capable of travelling many times faster than the speed of sound before smashing into cities without warning. Unlike the V-1 flying bomb, the spluttering engine of which gave Londoners a few moments of dreadful anticipation, the V-2 struck before anybody heard it. The explosion came first; the sound followed afterwards. It was the world’s first ballistic missile.
The V-2 has always occupied a strange place in the history of the Second World War. It was both technologically astonishing and strategically futile. It represented a leap into the future while emerging from one of the darkest regimes in human history. It killed thousands in London and Antwerp, yet far more perished while building it in the tunnels of Mittelwerk, the underground factory in central Germany where concentration camp prisoners were worked to death under unimaginable conditions.
For years, however, one aspect of the story has fascinated me more than any other: how the Allies learned what the V-2 actually was – because the Germans guarded the secret obsessively.
Explosive revelations
During the early years of the war, British intelligence received fragmentary reports suggesting that something unusual was happening on the Baltic coast at Peenemünde. There were whispers of rockets. Strange test facilities had appeared. A handful of agents mentioned experimental weapons. But the information arriving in London was contradictory and confusing. Some believed that the Germans were developing long-range rockets. Others dismissed the idea as fantasy.
One of the most intriguing figures in this story is the scientist Reginald Victor Jones, a brilliant British intelligence officer who became convinced that Nazi Germany really was attempting to build a giant rocket. Jones was one of those wonderfully eccentric wartime minds: imaginative enough to grasp the possibility, rigorous enough to pursue the evidence. Yet even within the British establishment there was scepticism. Lord Cherwell, Churchill’s scientific adviser, thought the rocket theory absurd. The arguments became fierce and deeply personal.
Meanwhile, the Germans pressed ahead.
The centre of development was indeed at Peenemünde, where aerospace engineer (and, after the war, Nasa pioneer) Wernher von Braun and Major-General Walter Dornberger oversaw the creation of what became the V-2. The scale of the enterprise was immense. Thousands of engineers and workers were involved. The technical challenges alone were staggering. This was to be not merely a bigger artillery shell but a machine capable of reaching the edge of space before descending on its target at supersonic speed.
When the RAF bombed Peenemünde in August 1943, the Germans dispersed parts of the programme east into occupied Poland. That decision would prove crucial. Because there the Germans faced one enemy unlike any other in Europe: the Polish underground state.
Resistance is fertile
The Polish resistance has often been remembered chiefly through the prism of the Warsaw Uprising, but by 1944 the Home Army had constructed an extraordinary clandestine network stretching across the country. It gathered intelligence, sabotaged infrastructure, printed underground newspapers, and infiltrated German operations on a remarkable scale.
In the forests and fields around Blizna in southern Poland, the Germans began testing V-2 rockets. Inevitably, some failed. Many, however, launched successfully; when they crashed into the ground hundreds of kilometres north of the launch point, the Polish underground and German army both raced to collect telltale remnants of this secret and terrifying weapon.
In retrospect, the operation to find, remove and research one of the crashed rockets feels almost impossible, with individuals taking enormous risks at every stage. Farmers, priests, engineers, couriers, scientists, radio operators and partisans all became part of a vast improvised effort to understand Germany’s most advanced weapon.
Eventually, a V-2 that crashed into marshy ground at Sarnaki, near the River Bug about 80 miles east of Warsaw, failed to explode properly. Instead of being obliterated, much of the missile survived because it simply went ‘splat’.
The implications were enormous. For the first time, the Allies had the chance to examine substantial pieces of Germany’s secret weapon. Not vague intelligence reports, not guesses, but actual hardware. What followed was an extraordinary race against time.
The Germans knew that rocket parts were going missing after crashes. They launched investigations, with search teams combing impact sites, and the Gestapo became increasingly suspicious that information was leaking out of occupied Poland. Yet somehow the resistance repeatedly managed to stay one step ahead.
Silent witness
The landscape itself still carries traces of the story.
When I visited Sarnaki, the weather was bleak and cold. The Bug snaked through the countryside, broad and brown beneath the low sky. The landscape still feels remote enough that you can imagine the events unfolding there in secrecy.
I found myself thinking about the moment the rocket came down nearby. The silence today makes it difficult to imagine the violence of the event itself: the shockwave, the panic, the rush to secure the site before the Germans arrived. That silence also somehow preserves the atmosphere of secrecy that surrounded the operation.
The rural location of this story is striking. We tend to think of intelligence history in terms of London offices, codebreakers and diplomatic intrigue. But so much of the V-2 story happened in muddy villages, forests and isolated farmsteads.
Men cycled through darkness carrying messages between local Home Army commanders, scientists in clandestine laboratories in Warsaw, and radio operators transmitting intelligence to London. Farmers hid fragments of rocket components beneath haystacks or inside barns before resistance couriers spirited them away.
In Warsaw, two of Poland’s leading scientists, Professor Janusz Groszkowski, an expert in radio engineering, and the chemist Professor Marceli Struszyński, painstakingly examined the recovered parts. Their aim was not to reconstruct a working V-2, but to discover how it functioned: its guidance system, fuel tanks, engine and construction. They measured, photographed and sketched every component before preparing reports for Britain, giving Allied scientists their clearest picture yet of Germany’s revolutionary weapon. The stakes could hardly have been higher. If caught, those involved faced torture and execution.
Part of the tension in this story comes from the sheer fragility of the enterprise. At numerous points, the operation could have collapsed completely. A single informant, a chance patrol, a delayed message, or a mistimed movement might have destroyed everything. Yet the operation continued.
The tale is especially relevant today because it reveals something important about the nature of wartime alliances and intelligence cooperation. British histories of the Second World War have not always given sufficient credit to Polish contributions. Yet in this case the Polish underground provided intelligence that Britain simply could not have acquired independently. Without the Polish resistance, the Allies would have known far less about the V-2 for far longer.
That matters not only historically but emotionally, too. Travelling through these areas, speaking to locals, visiting museums and sites connected with the operation, I was repeatedly struck by how vividly the story survives in local memory while remaining relatively obscure in Britain.
At Blizna, where the Germans conducted many of the test launches, there is today a small museum containing remnants of rockets and wartime material recovered from the area. Walking around it on a cold November morning, looking at twisted fragments of metal and ceramic components, it was impossible not to think about the tense drama surrounding these objects in 1944. At the time, such scraps represented perhaps the most secret technology in the world.
The atmosphere at Motyl, the scene of the clandestine landing operation by the RAF, affected me even more strongly, perhaps because the place still feels so isolated. The mission itself carried huge dangers. The Dakota crew had to navigate their way across Europe at night, land on a rough, improvised strip, load precious cargo quickly, and escape again before German forces intervened.
Standing there even now, with the cold air rolling in from the east and the mountains faintly visible on the horizon, it became possible to imagine the fear and tension of that night.
International collaboration
There is also something deeply moving about the international nature of the story. British airmen, Polish resistance fighters, local villagers, scientists and intelligence officers all became linked through this desperate attempt to understand and counter one of Hitler’s deadliest weapons.
The rocket was a technological marvel – there is no point pretending otherwise. Its engineering was astonishing. But it emerged from a regime driven by fantasy, brutality and self-destruction. Hitler poured enormous resources into “wonder weapons” partly because he increasingly believed technology could reverse Germany’s collapsing military position.
It could not. By the time the V-2 entered service in significant numbers, Germany was already losing the war irretrievably. The rocket inflicted terror and suffering, but it could not alter the outcome.
Yet the legacy of the V-2 stretches far beyond the Third Reich. Modern ballistic missiles descend directly from that weapon. So does the space age. The engineers who built the V-2 later helped create both Soviet and American rocket programmes. The road to the moon runs, uncomfortably, through Peenemünde and Mittelwerk. That moral complexity is one reason the subject remains so compelling.
Writing the book also forced me to think about the strange relationship between landscapes and memory. So many wartime sites today appear utterly ordinary. The forests grow back. Roads are rebuilt. Lakes form. Villages continue quietly with daily life. Unless you know the story, you would never suspect what happened there.
And secrecy lies at the heart of this story.
Indeed, one challenge in writing the book was resisting the temptation to reveal too much too early. The operation unfolded in stages, each one more hazardous than the last. First came the painstaking gathering of intelligence from launch sites and crash locations, and then the race to recover intact components before German search parties could reach them. After that came the clandestine scientific examination of the rocket in occupied Warsaw, followed by the even greater challenge of convincing London that the priceless cargo could actually be smuggled out of occupied Europe. With every success, the risks multiplied. The closer the resistance came to unlocking the V-2’s secrets, the more perilous the operation became.
Eventually, the Allies faced a conundrum. If the rocket fragments and intelligence could somehow be transported out of occupied Poland, the value to British scientists and military planners would be immense. But accomplishing that would require an operation of extraordinary boldness.
Which brings us back to Motyl and that muddy strip beside the lake in the darkness of a Polish summer night in 1944; back to the waiting Dakota aircraft and the men risking their lives to load its mysterious cargo before hopefully vanishing once again into the sky. The mission itself was a remarkable feat of international cooperation. The RAF crew had flown from Italy under the cover of darkness, while Home Army soldiers secured the landing ground, guided the aircraft in and guarded the precious cargo. Among those waiting to board were key figures from the Polish underground, carrying not only crucial rocket components but also scientific reports compiled in occupied Warsaw.
Other ways of getting the material to Britain had been considered, including courier routes through occupied Europe, but they were judged too slow and too vulnerable to German interception. An airlift was enormously risky, yet it offered the only realistic chance of delivering both the evidence and the men who understood it. What happened next represents one of the most remarkable episodes of the war.
Guy Walters is a historian, journalist and author. His latest book is Stealing Hitler's Rocket: The Incredible Mission to Smuggle a V-2 Rocket Out of Nazi-Occupied Europe to Britain (Apollo, 2026)
]]>Did Britain really 'keep calm and carry on' in WW2?https://www.historyextra.com/membership/did-britain-really-keep-calm-and-carry-on-in-ww2/2026-08-28T12:31:20.000ZKeep calm and carry on' has long been held up as the defining spirit of wartime Britain. But was the nation really as united, stoic and unquestioning as popular memory suggests?
In this episode, Steven Casey takes Isabel King through the often surprising reality of Britain's wartime morale.
]]>Did the Catholic Church support Hitler?https://www.historyextra.com/membership/did-the-catholic-church-support-hitler-podcast/2026-08-26T11:07:17.000ZHow did the politically neutral Catholic church come to have dealings with the fascist regimes of Mussolini and Hitler? In this episode, Ambrogio Caiani tells Charlotte Vosper why the Curia was enticed by authoritarianism, and what these deals with dictators meant for ordinary Catholics and non-Catholics alike.
]]>"Weimar's citizens cheered on Hitler": why the home of German democracy was easy prey for the Nazishttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/weimars-citizens-cheered-on-hitler-why-the-home-of-german-democracy-was-easy-prey-for-the-nazis/2026-07-08T13:56:39.000ZAdolf 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.
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.
- Read more | Timeline: the rise and fall of the Third Reich
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”.
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.
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
]]>Weimar's descent from democracy to barbarismhttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/weimars-descent-from-democracy-to-barbarism/2026-06-03T06:50:29.000ZWeimar is a small German city. Yet it looms large in European history. In the 1920s, it was synonymous with liberalism, internationalism and the fine arts. Yet, within a decade, many of its residents had embraced Nazism and Hitler was professing his love for the city. Here, in conversation with Spencer Mizen, historian and author Katja Hoyer reveals how the city that gave its name to Germany's great social democratic experiment succumbed to tyranny.
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If you'd like to hear more from Katja Hoyer talking about German history on the HistoryExtra podcast, then you can check out this Life of the Week episode on Otto von Bismarck
]]>Spies, radicals and deportees: one hotel in wartime Parishttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/spies-radicals-deportees-one-hotel-wartime-paris-podcast/2026-05-27T08:00:58.000ZThe Hotel Lutetia in central Paris lived several lives in the tortured times of the 1930s and 1940s. Before the war, it was the hub of dissenting activity from anti-Nazi German exiles. During the war, it was the HQ for German military intelligence – and after the war, it was a deportee relocation centre.
Jane Rogoyska, author of Hotel Exile, talks to David Musgrove about what we can learn about the remarkable story of the this ever-evolving building.
]]>“You can’t kill and maim with impunity”: the powerful legacy of Nuremberghttps://www.historyextra.com/membership/nuremberg-trials-episode-four/2026-05-12T07:00:13.000ZIn the 80 years since Nazi leaders stood in the dock, how has the international community sought to deal with war criminals around the globe? For this concluding episode of our four-part series on the Nuremberg Trials, David Musgrove is joined by the lawyer and author Philippe Sands to chart the long, complex legacy of the events of 1945-46, and to consider whether those accused of war crimes in the present day might one day face international justice.
Watch the full episode, or listen ad-free at the link below:
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Want to know more about the Nuremberg Trials? David Musgrove has curated a selection of essential reading from the HistoryExtra Magazine archive. Go beyond the podcast.
Philippe Sands is the author of East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2016).
]]>Churchill called him the greatest British general of the war – so why isn't he better remembered?https://www.historyextra.com/membership/churchill-called-him-the-greatest-british-general-of-the-war-so-why-isnt-he-better-remembered/2026-05-08T14:30:28.000ZIn profile
Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck was a British career soldier who saw active service in the First World War, and later served with distinction during the Second World War. ‘The Auk’, as he was dubbed, was commander-in-chief of the British Indian Army in 1941 and 1943–47, and commander-in-chief of British forces in the Middle East from July 1941 to August 1942. He died in Morocco at the age of 96.
When did you first hear about Auchinleck?
Growing up, because he was a hero of my family, particularly my grandfather who worked for him in the 18 months before the partition of India and the birth of Pakistan. My grandfather thought him a man of great integrity and, when I researched my family memoir, I realised that his assessment was right: Auchinleck was a great British hero.
What kind of man was he?
He did not have a privileged background, lost his father at an early age, and got into Wellington College, a public school, only through its scheme for the sons of deceased soldiers. He joined the Indian Army largely because it was cheaper than becoming an officer in the British Army. He was the kind of officer who ate with his men, and made a point of learning the languages of his troops [in the Indian Army]. He was also good at giving credit where it was due, unlike some figures in authority.
What made Auchinleck a hero?
First, the crucial role he played in helping to turn the tide against the Germans at the first battle of El Alamein in 1942 – a terrible year for the Allies, when it was not at all clear whether they would win the war. Second, his handling of the thorny issue of what to do with Indian soldiers who had defected to the Japanese. He made an effort to differentiate between those who had committed acts of brutality and those who found themselves in an impossible situation and switched sides. Third, the way he sought to ensure that the Indian Army remained above the communal fray at partition in 1947. His views on race, class and religion were ahead of his time in many ways.
What was his finest hour?
All of the above, really. He played a crucial role in thwarting Rommel’s advance in north Africa, and drew up the plan that Montgomery [who succeeded Auchinleck, as commander of the Eighth Army] later used to win the second battle of El Alamein in the autumn of 1942. I find it baffling that Auchinleck’s actions in laying the foundations for that success have never really been fully appreciated. However, Churchill himself seems to have belatedly recognised his importance, and is said to have told a young Conservative MP not long after the end of the Second World War that Auchinleck was “the greatest British general of the war”.
Is there anything that you don’t admire about him?
No, though it’s worth pointing out that he had a lot of sadness in his life. His wife left him for a fellow officer in quite public circumstances.
What would you say to Auchinleck if you could meet him?
I’d say that I recognised what hard times he had to live through and show leadership in. I’d also express my sadness at the fact that he was not better known in his own country.
Mishal Husain is a journalist and broadcaster. Her memoir, Broken Threads: My Family from Empire to Independence (Fourth Estate), is out now in paperback. The Mishal Husain Show from Bloomberg Weekend is available on podcast platforms and YouTube
This article was first published in the April 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
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