Invasion Plan

Hitler's Intention To Invade Britain

German WWII plan to invade Britain was revealed in MI5 files. German troops were equipped with spy photos of Dover for the invasion.

German shock troops would have landed at Dover, dressed in British uniforms, if the Luftwaffe had won the Battle of Britain, newly-released files suggest.

Details of the plan to invade Britain emerge from a post-war debrief of a German soldier and are in an MI5 file made public at the National Archives. Cpl Werner Janowski was interrogated about his wartime work for the German Intelligence Service, the Abwehr.

The plan was abandoned because invading troops would have faced an RAF attack. Dover was to be the focal point of the invasion, but German troops would have landed elsewhere along the south coast, as well as in Scotland and the south of Ireland.

Dr Ed Hampshire, principal records specialist at the National Archives, said: "The idea of German shock troops wearing enemy uniforms, as they had in the Low Countries, is fascinating."

"It's really The Eagle Has Landed stuff. It gives an indication of what might have happened if the Battle of Britain had gone the other way," he said.

After the shock troops had captured the docks at Dover, the plan was for the main contingent of German troops to be brought over in barges to disembark at the docks.

Invasion Off

Cpl Janowski described how his unit trained extensively in invasion techniques on the beaches of France during September and early October 1940. But at the end of October some units were transferred elsewhere and they realised the invasion 'Operation Sea Lion' had been called off.

Hitler changed his invasion plans because Hermann Goering's Luftwaffe had been unable to destroy the RAF and without air superiority the German troops would have been too vulnerable. Cpl Janowskialso said "the RAF destroyed most of the invasion barges at Dunkirk in bombing raids in December 1940".

The plan involved a huge aerial bombardment of the Dover area prior to the shock troops' landing, he explained. Cpl Janowski then went into great detail about the route they would have taken to try to and secure the town.

Having effected a landing they would proceed along the cliffs to a point outside of Dover where there were steps leading down to the beach and from this point they were to continue along the beach.

They would regain the cliff head by means of some steps near Dover station and then pass alongside the railway station and take possession of three docks on which there were big gun emplacements.

Then they would send a signal to Luftwaffe that the docks were in their possession. By the time Cpl Janowski was being interrogated, the war was already over and MI5's focus was on another enemy - the Red Army of the Soviet Union.

Cpl Janowski had been employed later in the war by the Jahnke Buro, a section of the Abwehr which it was feared had been infiltrated by Soviet agents. MI5 feared some German agents, like Janowski's superior Wilhelm Hollmann, might go to work for the KGB.

Blitz

The defiance of Britain as it endured eight months of German bombing over 70 years ago is etched on the collective memory and immortalised in the phrase "Blitz spirit".

But does this image of national unity tell the whole story? Even for those lucky enough not to have been there, the sound of the sirens is enough to evoke those nights of 1940 when British cities were under constant attack.

For eight consecutive months, every dawn brought a new terrible toll - more bodies, more craters in the street, more buildings reduced to rubble and more fires burning.

People emerged from their air raid shelters, from under railway arches or merely from under the stairs, to see if their homes were still standing, or if their neighbours were still alive. Then they dusted themselves down and went to work.

This period has become part of British folklore and the Blitz spirit a byword for calmness, invoked at times of need, not unlike after the 7/7 bombings in London. But is this image of a nation standing shoulder to shoulder an accurate one?

The German Bombing Of Britain

The Blitz began on 7th September 1940, with a 10-hour raid on London, signalling the start of the bombing campaign after many isolated raids Hundreds of tonnes of high explosives and incendiaries were dropped that night.

Killing 436 people and injuring more than 1,600 In October, then other British areas began to be pounded, with terrible losses in Hull, Liverpool, Coventry, Belfast and Clydebank Germany targeted all of the docks, industry and transport.

Germany opened another front in May 1941, when the Luftwaffe was redeployed to the invasion of Russia. In total, 43,000 civilians had died and more than 70,000 were injured.

Although the main Blitz was over, the bombing of British cities went on throughout the war. Although there was some panic and chaos in those first few nights. The British Under Attack, the term "Blitz spirit" typifies two qualities that emerged, endurance and defiance.

There was endurance in the face of an external danger. People were going through it together, putting up with eight months of constant bombardment in cities like London, Liverpool, Birmingham and Bristol. In ther end people became absolutely exhausted, but on the whole there was very little panic, they went to work, and carried on with their daily lives.

And the other thing is defiance. There were no, or very few, calls for surrender, the morale didn't implode. Our war production kept up. And even if people were bombed out, and had to go underground or leave London, they would come back to work.

Despite this fortitude, it's important not to be over-sentimental about the Blitz, because a lot of social tensions remained unresolved.

Coventry

The City and its cathedral, were destroyed. The 30s had been a very difficult period, with high unemployment, class antagonism and industrial relations were very bad. There were strikes during the war and anti-Jewish prejudice increased during the Blitz.

People felt during the Blitz that they were expected to take it, especially the working class population, who got the roughest of the Blitz because they lived near where they worked, near factories or the docks, and often in houses not very well built. They felt they had suffered a lot and the government owed them.

Some people exploited the crisis for their own gain, although this wasn't widespread. "Bomb-chasers" followed the latest raids so they could loot shops, while some people were charged money to get a place on the Tube Station to sleep at night.

It Felt Like The End Of The World

Everything was blown to pieces, you could see it all by the red glow reflecting from the fires that were still raging. On emerging from an air raid shelter in east London after the first night of the Blitz. "I looked out the back and saw that where my father's shed had been there was just a pile of rubble."

"Then I saw two bodies, two heads sticking up. I recognised one in particular: it was a Chinese neighbour, Mr Say. He had one eye closed and I realised he was dead. I just convulsed, I was shaking all over."

"I thought, well, I must be dead because they were, so I struck a match and tried to burn my finger. I kept doing it to see if I was still alive. I could see, but I thought, I cannot be alive. This is the end of the world."

More Memories Of The Blitz

There were other tensions as cities outside London felt their suffering was overlooked, For security reasons, places weren't always named in news reports, but national newspapers and the BBC were also guilty of playing down the damage and casualties in some regional cities.

Although Hull suffered terribly, losing 85% of its buildings, it was only referred to in some reports as "a North East town", says Ms Gardiner. People there were incensed when they went to the cinema and it was all about the destruction of Coventry.

It was often up to local papers to describe the losses and celebrate the strength of character. Morale suffered in places that were not as well prepared, like Coventry, Bristol and Plymouth.

"However, people across the country were aware that London got more pummelled than anyone else and people were shocked when they came to London and saw the scale of the devastation."

The Blitz wasn't the first time London had been under attack, however. In 1917 and 1918, twice as many people used the Tube to escape the air raids as did in 1940. So many people remembered the bomb shelters they had used 20 years earlier, and headed to the same spots.

The British Under Attack

"We just didn't talk about it as much. But the First World War was different because the raids were nothing like on the scale of 1940, and also most of the real fighting was going on overseas."

When the Blitz finally ended on 16th May 1941, the fighting was still to be done, but Adolf Hitler was left frustrated that all those German bombs had failed to break British spirits. And they had failed to bring Winston Churchill to the negotiating table and failed to dent the British war production.

The Nazi leadership was shocked by British resilience and the Fuhrer turned his attentions to Russia. By the end of the year, the US had entered the war.

The indomitable spirit demonstrated across the UK in 1940 and 1941, has been invoked since by politicians to galvanise national pride, and by the media to recall fondly an era when we were apparently made of sterner stuff.

It even goes to the heart of what many regard as Britishness. But there could be other, more subtle ways the Blitz has shaped our national character.

Do Germans Invoke Their Own Blitz spirit

It's right and proper that we commemorate the valour and bravery as well as the suffering that went on in Britain in 1940, but it's unthinkable that Germans would be having a conversation like this about the bombing of their cities, because the scale was colossal compared with what happened here.

Half a million civilians were killed from the bombing. What people remember there is the horror of it all, the nightly terror of knowing the bombers were coming.

You can't look back on that and think how brave the population were, or what courageous Blitz spirit there was. People remember the fear, the suffering, the deaths and the devastation.

Mark Connelly, professor of modern British military history, says there is a modern tendency to focus on the glorious side to the Blitz and forget the bloodshed. But the tale of heroism against the German might was what forged our national identity.

"I think that the Blitz is absolutely crucial to modern British self-perceptions. 1940 is the centre of thinking of the war for the British, Dunkirk, Battle of Britain and the Blitz, and all in that one iconic year."

"For many reasons, what that does is confirm a trajectory of British national culture that started to emerge in the late 18th Century, of the British believing that they are best when they are alone, when their backs are against the wall, when they don't have foreign-speaking allies to pander to."

Since 1945, that British approach to the world, evident in the tabloids in relation to the European Union, is still deeply embedded, he believes. "Many British governments from 1945 onwards wanted to celebrate the idea of consensus and a family spirit, and the Blitz was meant to be the solvent that brought that family together.

It has also influenced a defence policy. The Blitz also forged a social contract for peacetime that remains to this day.

War Crimes Hunt WWII

The Eichmann search was ended too early; Adolf Eichmann was executed for war crimes in 1962. British authorities called off the hunt for the man who organised the Nazi Holocaust just 17 months after the end of World War II, files have revealed.

The files relating to Adolf Eichmann were released by The National Archives. They show that at the time the decision was made, Eichmann was hiding in the British-controlled zone of Germany.

From there he went to Argentina in 1950, where he was later abducted by Israeli secret police. Following his trial, Eichmann was executed for his crimes against humanity.

At the end of the war Eichmann, who organised and administered the Holocaust, was among the most wanted men in Europe. It has since been found that he arranged the deportation of Jews across Europe and his office ordered the Zyclon B gas for the gas chambers.

But the files reveal that in February 1947, the British War Crimes Unit decided to call off their hunt for him. A Major Cowper wrote to an officer: "An exhaustive search had been carried out, but the only indication of his fate was he may have committed suicide."

Case Closed

On that basis, the major wrote that the case would be considered closed by the unit. Ironically, Eichmann was living in the British sector of Germany at the time.

Professor David Cesarani, who is Eichmann's biographer, said: "There could not have been a safer place for Eichmann to have been than in the British zone because at that point the British police field intelligence had struck him off their list of wanted men."

Prof Cesarani believes this probably helped the war criminal to stay in Germany until he escaped to South America in 1950, where he lived for another decade.

He said at the time the British Crimes Unit was very small and very over-stretched and its priority was to track down Nazis responsible for atrocities against British servicemen.

German report reveals war-time diplomats' 'Nazi role'By Stephen Evans. The report was commissioned by the foreign ministry in 2005. Germany's diplomats were more deeply involved in the Holocaust than previously known, according to an official German government report.

The government is considering making the 900-page text mandatory reading for all its diplomats. The report was commissioned after it emerged that flattering obituaries of war-time diplomats were being published internally.

The report challenges the idea that diplomats were far from the Holocaust. A myth seemed to have grown up within the post-war foreign ministry that German war-time diplomats were not involved in the mass murder and even opposed it.

The report, commissioned by the foreign ministry, says diplomats were willing participants who spied on Jewish fugitives for the Nazis.

One of the authors said: "The German foreign ministry collaborated with the Nazis' violent politics and especially assisted in all aspects of the discrimination, deportation, persecution and genocide of the Jews."

The historians discovered the travel expenses of one senior diplomat who went to German-occupied Serbia in 1941, to help organise the killing of Jews. The expenses form said simply: "Liquidation of Jews in Belgrade."

Holocaust

Last survivors of the Holocaust keep memories alive.

Two remarkable women living hundreds of miles apart were fortunate enough to survive the Holocaust, one became a famous pianist, the other fought with Tito's Partisans.

Jamila Kolonomos said: "I survived the Holocaust only because I joined the resistance".

Her finger traces the outline of her family members on photographs. "My mother Estef, my father Isaac," she begins, moving through the pictures slowly. "Then my brothers and sisters." She goes on, naming all 18 of her relatives killed in the Holocaust.

"I was the only one not taken. I didn't even say goodbye to them," she muses, grappling with the memories. Jamila Kolonomos is one of the few Jews still remaining in Macedonia, a country that lost 98% of its Jewish population, the highest proportion anywhere in the world.

Screams

At 89 years old, she is one of the few who remembers the deportation of the Macedonian Jews, sent by the occupying Bulgarian forces to the Nazi German death camp at Treblinka in Poland.

The Holocaust Memorial centre of Macedonian Jews opened in March 2011 Jamila only survived by hiding in Macedonia and then joining Genral Tito's partisan resistance. Jamila can't forget the screams as the soldiers arrived. "I still dream about them. And now, when I laugh, something aches in my heart."

As the cold, cramped trains filled with deportees wound their way from the Balkans through Central Europe and up into Poland, they may even have passed another camp on the way, Plaszow, just outside the city of Krakow, since immortalised in the film Schindler's List.

Natalia Allowed To Live

It was there that Natalia Karp, was taken in 1943. She was a young, beautiful concert pianist from Krakow, trying to escape into the mountains with her sister when she was seized.

The two women were sent to Plaszow, destined to be killed. But the camp commander, Amon Goeth (played in the film by Ralph Fiennes) had one soft spot in an otherwise brutal character, he was a music lover, and the night Natalia arrived was his birthday.

Natalia Karp survived and played concerts into her 90s An order was sent out for the young virtuoso Polish pianist to play at his party. Goeth was dressed in his white uniform and surrounded by beautiful women. She had not played for four years whilst in hiding. The commander suddenly turned to her and ordered: "Sit down and play."

She chose Chopin's Nocturne in C Sharp Minor, a piece full of sadness. As she ended the last note, she paused. The commander turned. "She will live", he said.

"Not without my sister," she cried. "She, too, will survive," Goeth proclaimed. For 10 months, the two women remained in Plaszow. Then they were moved to Auschwitz Birkenau where, again, they survived.

When the war ended, Natalia moved to London. There, she continued a successful career and was, fittingly, elected a member of the Chopin Society.

Natalia continued giving concerts into her 90s. She could walk, unaided - to the grand piano for her recitals, and she played with such grace.

She always wore short sleeves so that her Auschwitz number tattooed onto her arm remained visible. And then in July 2007, at the age of 96, she died suddenly of a heart attack.

One of the most important chapters in European Jewish history had closed, at her funeral the congregation listened to her recording of the same Chopin nocturne that had saved her life.

The camps bequeathed to Natalia a determination to survive, a courage that will forever be admired.

Untold Suffering

Until the end, she looked so much younger than she was, always able to recall tiny details from years before. She travelled and entertained and even drove (badly) into her 90s.

Each of the survivors, passes on to the next generation the responsibility to remember and inform, and ensure that the "stories Of Jamila, of Natalia, and of millions more never die”.

She was strong, she loved life, she was seemingly unbeatable. It was even as though she had chosen when to die suddenly, so as not to fade away through illness.

Both were utterly lucid in their old age, both full of warmth.

One had been spared the horrors of the camp but lost her entire family. The other had been spared death but forced to live through beatings at Plaszow and Auschwitz. Both had endured untold suffering in their own ways.

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