ds The word Wackes, meaning an imbecile, was responsible for the so-called Zabern Incident in 1913, when the German army’s treatment of the Alsatian locals led to mass demonstrations, and there was a vote of no-confidence in the German chancellor in the Reichstag.
dt See above p. 224.
du Sir Bernard Freyberg’s bombing of the Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino killed around 400 Italian civilians who had taken refuge there, and not one German.
dv Information from Blair Worden, August 2004: Worden is Lord Dacre’s literary executer. The Last Days of Hitler was not intended for publication and Trevor-Roper was surprised when British intelligence consented. Any interrogations he carried out were concerned with the report. They had nothing to do with collecting evidence for Nuremberg or other trials.
dw Göring had been left the medieval castle by Hermann von Epenstein, the Jewish doctor who was his mother’s lover and Hermann’s godfather. Hermann’s Christian name was most probably in homage to the doctor and freshly minted nobleman. David Irving, Göring: A Biography, London 1989, 26-7.
dx The castle was owned by Hermann Fegelein’s brother Waldemar. Hitler’s brother-in-law Hermann Fegelein had been executed in the Chancellery garden a few days before. The castle was teeming with further SS men, something calculated to make Göring no more comfortable.
dy In June 1940, Göring told Hitler he had had two Catholic priests sent to a concentration camp because they had failed to rise when he entered a Rhineland inn. He gave orders that they should have to give the Nazi salute to one of his old caps every day. Henrik Eberle and Matthias Uhl, eds, Das Buch Hitler, Bergisch Gladbach 2004, 123.
dz Those who had enforced the ban on the NSDAP were singled out for particularly harsh treatment: politicians, judges and the guards at the Corporate State’s own concentration camp at Wöllersdorf in Lower Austria. The hangman who had executed the Nazi participants in the assassination of chancellor Dolfuss in 1934 did not survive the first night in Dachau. See Bruno Heilig, Men Crucified, London 1941.
ea Horthy had been Hitler’s ally, but Hitler had had him deposed after he started negotiating with the Allies. One reason why the two fell out was Horthy’s refusal to ‘deport’ Hungary’s large Jewish population. Hitler had him interned in 1944. He did not return to Hungary and died in Estoril, Portugal in 1957.
eb Blomberg had been out of the picture since January 1938, and had not even played a role in the Anschluss. Hitler managed to push him out of the way when it was discovered that he had married a former prostitute. His conscience cannot have been said to be clear, however, as it was he who brought the army in behind Hitler, in recompense for the murder of Röhm and the others who would have had the SA take over from the traditional Wehrmacht. The Night of the Long Knives had seen the killing of army officers as well, but Blomberg was happy to celebrate its success with a slap-up meal with Göring at Horcher’s restaurant in Berlin.
ec Blaskowitz’s suicide is odd for the fact that he was one of the few generals to file a formal complaint about the activities of the SS, in this case after the invasion of Poland. There was a rumour that he did not take his life at all, but was murdered by SS men.
ed Papen remembered things differently: he was third, after Schacht and Speer. Streicher came last, ‘a position which could have been occupied by almost any of the other Gauleiters’. (Franz von Papen, Memoirs, London 1952, 547.) Speer, on the other hand, recalled that it was Seyss who had won the intelligence competition. He modestly concealed his own place in the line-up. (Albert Speer, Spandau: The Secret Diaries, London 1976, 9.)
ee He was murdered by the IRA in 1979.
ef The Berliner Zeitung reported that it had taken Ribbentrop 14 minutes 45 seconds to die, and Jodl a little longer. Ruth Andreas Friedrich, Schauplatz Berlin, Frankfurt/Main 1985, 148.
eg A spring festival to commemorate a plot to massacre the Jews.
eh Kesselring’s sentence was commuted to life. Both he and List were released in 1952.
ei There must have been some truth in these allegations. When the author was living in France in the early 1980s he met two people who had witnessed massacres carried out by Allied troops: a man who had been eighteen at the time, and a woman who had been a child of six. She had run out of the house to find British paratroops bayoneting German POWs in her garden. A British friend of the author’s who had studied at Heidelberg before the war and was intelligence officer to his regiment, told him that he was unable to interrogate a single prisoner after the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane, because the British soldiers had killed the lot.
ej See above p. 70.
ek Eisenhower’s secretary - and mistress - Kay Summersby says the medals were handed to the Western Allies in Frankfurt, when Zhukov returned their visit.
el In German they are called the Lausitzer or Görlitzer Neisse and the Glatzer Neisse. The Glatzer Neisse joins the Oder at Schurgast in Upper Silesia, the Polish Skorogoszcz. In Polish the river is called the Kłodzka.
em The part of the Yalta Agreement would result in the deaths of thousands of Russians and Yugoslavs.
en The population east of the Bug was mixed, and the Poles were not intending to permit any Germans to remain east of the Oder-Neisse. This way the problem of racial minorities was solved.
eo Any areas where there had been substantial minorities of Poles were awarded to Poland at Versailles.
ep At the beginning of June there were 800,000 Germans left in East Prussia and 65 per cent of the Germans were still in Silesia. Half the Germans in Pomerania had moved out, but only 30 per cent of those in Brandenburg. In the Sudetenland only 3 per cent had left so far. (Gerhard Ziemer, Deutsche Exodus: Vertreibung und Eingliederung von 15 Millionen Ostdeutsche, Stuttgart 1973, 87-8).
eq Polish-East German agreement was not made until 1951 when an accord was signed in a villa in Frankfurt-an-der-Oder. The place later became the House of German-Soviet Friendship and a plaque was set up to mark the spot. It was one of the few restaurants in Frankfurt when the author ate there on 17 August 1991, the day of the Moscow Coup. Bewildered Soviet soldiers wandered around the garrison. Soljankasuppe seemed appropriate: it was the one culinary contribution made by the Russians in the long years of occupation.
er The Anglo-Americans had taken the decision to award part of their zones to the French. The Soviets were indifferent.
es Cf. the Deutschlandslied: ‘Von der Etsch bis an der Memel’ - Germany ran from the Adige to the Memel, on the Lithuanian border.
et See below pp. 527-8.
Copyright © 2007 by Giles MacDonogh
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