100 Documents That Changed the World

by Scott Christianson

  With the dropping of the first two atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945, Fermi became known as one of the ‘fathers of the atomic age’. The spot where he conducted his famous experiment is now marked by Henry Moore’s ‘Nuclear Energy’ sculpture and a historical plaque.

  The Manhattan Project notebook is part of the Records of the Atomic Energy Commission, Record Group 326, kept in the US National Archives.

  Workers in the Y-12 plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. As part of the Manhattan Project, the Y-12 plant developed ‘Little Boy’, the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945.

  Wannsee Protocol

  (1942)

  A select group of Hitler’s henchmen meet at a mansion outside Berlin to coordinate plans for the implementation of the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’, taking special security measures to cover their tracks. But an incriminating document survives.

  On 20 January 1942, 15 high-ranking Nazi Party and German government officials conferred at a lavish villa in Wannsee. The attendees included high-ranking representatives from the Foreign Office, the justice, interior, and state ministries, and officers from the Schutzstaffel (SS).

  Tasked by Hitler himself, and acting on the written authorization of Hermann Göring, SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich (Chief of the Reich Main Security Office) had convened the group to ensure that all of the necessary departments would be carrying out plans for most of the remaining Jews of German-occupied Europe to be deported to Poland and exterminated. It was to be the greatest organized and systematic campaign of mass murder in world history.

  Using statistics prepared by SS-Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann, chief of the RSHA Department IV B4 (Jewish Affairs), Heydrich reported that there were approximately 11 million Jews in Europe, half of them in countries not yet under German control. The Wannsee Protocol set forth the detailed and sequential plan for their annihilation.

  The policy decision had already been made at the highest level. Heydrich outlined how European Jews would be rounded up from west to east and sent to killing centres in occupied Poland, where they would be systematically killed. He also defined in precise terms who would be liquidated. The protocol called for millions of other persons in occupied territories to be removed by ‘natural causes’ (mass starvation, exposure and disease), and their property and food transferred to Germans.

  Although the 90-minute conference involved meticulous planning and records, the officers in charge later tried to couch the minutes in vague bureaucratic jargon to conceal what was planned. Despite their euphemisms – such as the use of the term ‘the Final Solution’ – the message was clear to all participants: they were ordered to carry out the genocide of European Jewry.

  In the end, nobody balked, and cognac and cigars were enjoyed before the attendees saluted each other and went about their business.

  The report of the meeting was carefully sanitized to disguise its murderous nature, and each copy of the Top Secret protocol was strictly controlled. After Heydrich was assassinated in June 1942, the Nazis thought they had destroyed all of the incriminating Wannsee files. But in 1947, a prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg obtained from the German Foreign Office number 16 [Martin Luther’s copy] of the 30 copies that had been prepared, and it provided a smoking gun.

  The Wannsee House, site of the conference, is now a Holocaust Memorial.

  Heydrich’s letter to Martin Luther following the Wannsee conference.

  Page six of the 15-page document lists the number of European Jews to be annihilated in the Final Solution: 330,000 in England alone; 11 million in total.

  The red and white checkered diary that Anne was given on her 13th birthday – 12 June 1942. Anne wrote the diary as a series of letters to imaginary friends, her favourite being ‘Kitty’. ‘The nicest part is being able to write down all my thoughts and feelings, otherwise I’d absolutely suffocate.’

  Anne Frank’s Diary

  (1942–44)

  A young Jewish girl hiding with her family in an attic reveals her most intimate thoughts in a diary that goes on to become probably the most famous account of life during the Holocaust, read by tens of millions of people.

  Anne Frank (1929–44) was a German-Jewish teenager who was forced to go into hiding in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam during the Holocaust. Shortly after receiving a diary for her 13th birthday, the girl started recording entries on 14 June 1942, and she continued writing down her impressions while confined with her family and four other fugitives as they hid behind a bookcase in a concealed attic space in her father’s office building.

  The young girl’s entries were made in the form of letters to several imaginary friends and she also employed pseudonyms to conceal the identities of her fellow fugitives and accomplices. Like many other normal teenagers, Anne agonized over her conflicted feelings about her family and a possible romantic interest, as well as her evolving thoughts about life. But her extraordinary depth and fine literary ability, combined with her optimism in the face of such adversity, made her account a literary and historical treasure.

  ‘It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all my ideals,’ she wrote shortly before her arrest,

  they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart… I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too, I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquility will return once more.

  Anne would end up spending two years and one month closeted in the hideaway, before the group was betrayed and sent off to concentration camps. Of the eight persons in hiding in the attic, only her father would survive. Anne succumbed to typhus in Belsen-Belsen in March 1945. She was just 15.

  A family friend later retrieved the diary from the attic and presented it to Anne’s father after the war. Upon reading it, Otto Frank persevered to get it published.

  The diary first appeared in Amsterdam in 1947 and was subsequently published in the US and the United Kingdom as Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl in 1952. Its immense popularity inspired award-winning stage and movie versions. To date the book has sold more than 30 million copies in 67 languages.

  The original manuscript was bequeathed to the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation.

  Germany’s Instrument of Surrender

  (1945)

  Solemn-faced generals from the victors and the vanquished convene at a table in Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s headquarters in northeastern France for Germany’s unconditional surrender. But after the document signing, the Soviets demand a more formal surrender in Berlin the next day.

  On 7 May 1945, a former high school in Reims, France, provided the setting for the abrupt surrender of the Third Reich. Converted to serve as the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), the area swarmed with armed sentries, Jeeps and a small group of grim-faced Nazi officers. Across a plain conference table, alongside map-covered walls, a phalanx of warriors from the opposing armies regarded each other with cold contempt. Despite the season, the Germans wore gloves.

  Those seated included representatives of the four Allied Powers – France, Great Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States – along with a German contingent headed by Generaloberst Alfred Jodl, who had been authorized to sign on behalf of the German Army. Eisenhower had sent as his delegate Lt. Gen. Walter Bedell Smith. Beneath Smith’s calm demeanour there was chaos because at the last minute the Soviets made clear that they wanted a second, more formal, surrender to be held in Berlin the next day.

  Also in the room were a corps of other officers, orderlies and guards, as well as 16 journalists who had been flown to the location on the condition that they not release any report until the SHAEF gave its green light.

  Copies of the English-language
version of the surrender instrument had been hurriedly typed by one of the command’s British secretaries, Susan Hibbert, and she was among the onlookers for the formal signing.

  Asked if they understood the terms of surrender, Jodl said ‘yes’. The surrender document called for German forces to surrender unconditionally to the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces and simultaneously to the Soviet High Command ‘all forces on land, sea and in the air’ who were under German control. Any German forces that failed to abide by the terms of surrender would be subject to appropriate punishment.

  Jodl signed the first Instrument of Surrender at 2:41 AM local time and continued until he had signed the copies in other languages. Then he asked for leave to speak and when it was granted he said:

  With this signature the German people and armed forces are for better or for worse delivered into the victor’s hands. In this war, which has lasted more than five years, both have achieved and suffered perhaps more than any other people in the world.

  As soon as the ceremony was over, the reporter for the Associated Press rushed to a telephone and called in his story, in violation of the news embargo. After the Soviets orchestrated a second, more public surrender in Berlin the following day, 8 May was officially celebrated as Victory in Europe Day.

  Jodl was later tried, convicted and hanged at Nuremberg for war crimes.

  The Instrument of Surrender, which ordered Germany to cease all military, naval and air operations on 8 May 1945 at 11:31 PM Central European time. The photograph shows Jodl signing the document in Reims in the early hours of 7 May.

  The first page of the Charter and the signing ceremony, held at the Veterans’ War Memorial Building, San Francisco, on 26 June 1945.

  United Nations Charter

  (1945)

  In the closing weeks of World War II, representatives of 46 governments gather in San Francisco to draft the charter for an effective replacement for the League of Nations – an international body that will help to maintain peace and security in the world.

  Notwithstanding the failure of the League of Nations to prevent a second global conflict, the victorious powers emerging from World War II were determined to create an effective international government to keep the peace. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had coined the term ‘United Nations’ in 1942 when marshalling nations to fight against the Axis Powers.

  Shortly after Germany’s surrender and FDR’s death, in June 1945 representatives of 46 nations attended the UN’s founding conference in San Francisco. With the war in the Pacific nearing its end, the delegates were determined to craft a mechanism that would prevent another violent global conflagration.

  Many of the challenges they faced were the same as those addressed by the League of Nations in 1918–19. But this time they also needed to find a way to resolve the problems that had doomed the earlier effort. The nations on the losing side of World War II were not present at the conference. But those on the winners’ side faced their own challenges.

  One mechanism the drafters devised was to create a permanent Security Council consisting of five major powers – the Republic of China, France, Great Britain, the US and USSR – each of whom would hold a unique veto power, allowing them to block any action they wished. That way, it was thought that the major powers would have more of a stake to continue in the organization. Designated as the lead apparatus responsible for ensuring world peace, the Security Council’s decisions were also made binding on all member states.

  The UN Charter called for a main body, composed of all the member nations, to be called the General Assembly. The document defined international security in broader terms than the League had done, hoping to assist smaller nations as well. This time security was expanded to include military protection, economic and social development, and the upholding of human rights and international justice.

  The Charter of the United Nations consists of a preamble and a series of articles grouped into chapters. It was publicly signed with great fanfare on 26 June 1945, with President Truman telling those assembled, ‘The time for action is now!’

  Truman signed the ratified treaty on 8 August, the same day the Soviet Union declared war on Japan and the US dropped the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki. The Charter came into force on 24 October 1945 and the UN is still operating.

  A United Nations poster from 1945, promoting the Charter’s call ‘for understanding – for peace.’

  George Orwell’s 1984

  (1946–49)

  A determined author – sick, impoverished and pursued by demons – struggles in a remote Scottish farmhouse to complete his bleak dystopian novel about life in a totalitarian state. ‘BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU’, he warns. The future has arrived.

  Eric Blair (1903–50) was an English essayist, journalist, critic and novelist who used the pen name George Orwell to write lucid prose with a social conscience. He had served as an imperial policeman in Burma and a fighter against fascism in the Spanish Civil War, but chronic lung problems kept him out of the military service in World War II; however he kept up with his pen, writing his anti-Stalinist allegorical novella, Animal Farm, in 1945.

  Orwell’s life turned grimmer when he lost his home to a German rocket bomb, and his wife died during a routine medical procedure. In order to survive and support his son, he laboured over another novel, which he tentatively called The Last Man in Europe. A friend provided a vacant house on a rocky tip of the island of Jura in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides where he could complete the work. Although suffering from tuberculosis, Orwell battled illness and deadline pressures to pound out the letters on a battered Remington portable typewriter.

  ‘I am just struggling with the last stages of this bloody book [which is] about the possible state of affairs if the atomic war isn’t conclusive,’ Orwell wrote to a friend. By 30 November 1948 he was done.

  ‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen,’ the novel began. ‘On each landing, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.’

  Orwell’s novel was published in June 1949 and quickly hailed as a masterpiece, but its completion had taken its toll. Orwell died of tuberculosis on 21 January 1950. Over time his chilling futuristic vision has become widely regarded as probably the ‘definitive novel of the 20th century’. Translated into more than 65 languages, it has sold millions of copies and introduced many prophetic concepts into postmodern discourse. ‘WAR IS PEACE. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.’ As much about language as politics, such terms as ‘doublethink’, ‘newspeak’ and ‘Big Brother’ are now part of everyone’s political vocabulary, along with the term ‘Orwellian’, signifying diametrically opposed meanings cast in ideological and euphemistic language.

  A facsimile of 1984 was published in 1984 showing images of Orwell’s frenzied original drafts alongside the final published version. The surviving manuscript of the novel is at the Brown University Library. Orwell’s distinctive title remains a mystery. Were the two final digits reversed to reflect the torturous year of its completion – a scary future that is really rooted in the present?

  The original hardback edition, published by Secker & Warburg in June 1949.

  Orwell’s typescript gives a fascinating insight into his extensive rewrites. The opening lines might not have been so memorable without his judicious edits.

  The Marshall Plan was signed into law as the Economic Cooperation Act on 3 April 1948.

  Marshall Plan

  (1947)

  Addressing Europe’s utter devastation from World War II, a former US Army military commander turned Secretary of State proposes an ambitious blueprint for European recovery that entails unprecedented financial aid from the United States.

  In his role as Army Chief of Staff from 1939 to 1945, General George Marshall (1880–1959) had helped lead the Allied Powers to victory
and earned the reputation as the greatest military organizer of his time. He was one of America’s most admired and trusted figures.

  Shortly after the war, as US Secretary of State under President Harry S. Truman, Marshall was tasked to advance America’s position on the urgent need for Europe’s rehabilitation. On 5 June 1947 he delivered an address proposing a programme of massive aid to the war-ravaged nations. Although Marshall was speaking to a large commencement audience at Harvard University, President Truman’s political advisers had avoided seeking any press coverage at home in the belief that American taxpayers might not favour such a plan. So instead, they arranged for the BBC to carry the speech via radio to audiences in Europe as a means of generating needed foreign support.

  The 1,200-word speech was straight and to the point, and delivered without oratorical flourishes; its content was of enormous economic and political import. Marshall said the war’s destruction of Europe’s infrastructure was hampering any recovery efforts to such an extent it could slow the region’s health and stability for many years to come.

  He suggested it was in America’s enlightened self-interest to do whatever it could ‘to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace. Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.’