WORLDWARTWO

‘Chin up! He died for the Führer!’ Irmgard herself was forced the following day by her schoolteacher to stand in front of the class and declare, ‘My father died in France for the Führer. Heil Hitler!’ These warped experiences did not reduce Irmgard’s enthusiasm. She joined the Hitler Youth, sat in air raid shelters deploring the defeatism around her, and felt relieved that Hitler survived the bomb plot in 1944. But at the end of the war her world unravelled, as did those of millions of other young Germans. The local SS opened up warehouses and parcelled out bales of cloth to the local inhabitants. The children all wore identical blue check dresses and skirts made of military grey for years after 1945. Irmgard joined other citizens of Berchtesgaden in looting trips to the homes of the Nazi bosses on Hitler’s mountain in the last days of the war. She finally seized a handsome, red leather-bound book with blank gilt-edged

pages from the ruins of Albert Speer’s villa. She confesses with no hint of coyness that her loot was used as the first visitors’ book in the guest house opened by her mother and stepfather in Berchtesgaden a few years after the war. Irmgard herself went to live in the United States in 1958. The epilogue illustrates with disarming clarity how easily Germans adapted to the democratic and increasingly prosperous age after the war. The photograph reproduced in the book of Irmgard’s mother in New York, pushing her grandchild around in a pram, seems light years away from the pictures of early-1930s Germany presented at the start of the book. The Germany of the 1930s cut itself off from the modern world outside; Hitler’s new Germany was self-consciously different. I can recall few other memoirs of ordinary life lived in extraordinary times that portray so powerfully and readably the complex realities of popular dictatorship. To order this book at £11.99, see order form on page 78

S IMON H EFFERONARECENTCLUTCHOF

a work about the novelist and not the statesman, and will be of interest mainly to aficionados of the former, or

C HURCHILLIANA

T HE C HURCHILL LITERARY industry seems to grind on unabated. Those of you who thought that every last action of the great man’s life had been recorded, documented, analysed and interpreted need to think again. Apparently, the publishers of the English-speaking world feel that there is still an insatiable demand from readers to spend armchair time with one of their favourite historical characters: each book is like a chance to ask an old, familiar friend round again for the evening. Of course, such people need to remember that too much of a good thing can make it seem stale and tired: which is the case with some of the new clutch of Churchilliana. However, there is still scope – thank heaven – for the odd bit of gold to turn up in the dross. Of these five books, only four are really about Churchill: the fifth, Dennis Wheatley: Churchill’s Storyteller (Spellmount 308pp £20), Craig Cabell’s interesting account of the war experiences of Dennis Wheatley, is a classic case of bandwagon-jumping. Wheatley, best remembered these days as a writer of novels about the occult, spent the war in intelligence and executed various schemes and ruses suggested or promoted by Churchill. Perhaps his bestknown stunt was that later immortalised in the film I Was Monty’s Double: he hired a bitpart actor with a striking resemblance to Field Marshal Montgomery to put the enemy off the scent of what Monty was really up to. This is

those fascinated by the deeds of spies and spymasters. Having said that, Cabell’s book is a better and more stimulating read than three of the other four on offer. Some authors at least subscribe to the school of thought which holds that if you are going to write a book about Churchill you had better find, or claim to have found, something original to say. This is certainly the sellingpoint for David J Bercuson and Holger H Herwig’s One Christmas in Washington: Churchill and Roosevelt Forge the Grand Alliance (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 352pp £20), an account of how Churchill visited Roosevelt immediately after the attack on Pearl Harbor and made the formal alliance between Britain and America. The authors say that because neither of the two diarists closest to Churchill, Sir Alan Brooke and Jock Colville, attended these meetings there is no particularly full account of what happened at them. Churchill’s official biographer, Sir Martin Gilbert, might dispute that, though he accords only a chapter, rather than a whole book, to the proceedings in the sixth volume of his life. Mind you, reading Gilbert tells you what you need to know about this event from Churchill’s perspective. What Bercuson and Herwig give us is a lot of background, plus a pile of minutiae about goings-on in Roosevelt’s White House, so their work is valuable if you want to understand the

Churchill: togged out for war

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LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006