In my broadcast speech to the nation over the wireless last Thursday I explained that in the event of our being obliged to choose between abandoning the Middle East to the Nazis and making a stand there, sustained by reinforcements from India, we should have to take the first course. Honorable Members will not, I trust, expect any elaboration this evening, on the strategic considerations that impel us to this decision. However, there is another factor bearing on our action which I should enlarge upon. In that same broadcast speech I spoke of the disappointment felt by Britain and the Empire, and shared by the leaders of Europe in exile, with the behavior of the Arab peoples and their rulers in the face of this conflict raging upon their soil. I chose my words so as not to provide gratuitous ammunition for Hitler and his disgusting stooge, the Mufti of Jerusalem, in their hate campaign against the democracies. I am under no such constraint in this place.
Churchill paused to accommodate the deep and resounding rumble of “Hear! Hear!” from all parts of the House.
I will therefore venture [he resumed, slipping off his spectacles and urging his massive jowl forward] this judgment— that in the long history of the Islamic peoples, a history steeped as often in villainy as it has been touched by grace, there is nothing to compare with the cowardly barbaric excesses of the Moslem rulers and their subjects against the hapless Jewish communities cast upon their mercy during these past few weeks.
King Farouk! [Churchill struck the dispatch box with a clenched fist.] An obese vessel of iniquity, fawning upon the jackbooted Nazi Fuehrer in an Egyptian capital misguidedly spared destruction upon my own orders . . . The Amir Abdullah of Transjordan, [the fist came down again] dallying with his concubines while the mutinous Frontier Force, trained and equipped by this nation, yap and snarl like bloodthirsty jackals around the doomed but still bravely resisting enclave of Tel Aviv.
Half a dozen Members were on their feet, including Aneurin Bevan, who was brusquely waving Members of his own party back into their seats. Breaking off his discourse and moving a pace back from the dispatch box, Churchill turned to scowl at two of his own Tory backbenchers, up on their feet, as if holding them personally responsible for the Welshman’s intervention. They sat down immediately, whereupon the P.M. lowered himself to a hastily vacated eighteen inches or so of Treasury bench, giving way to the one Member still standing.
Bevan’s voice, the most lethal polemical weapon ever raised against Churchill in secret or public session, was pitched to a higher register than the war leader’s; it seemed to be propelled, with a kind of reedy mellifluence, directly off his palate rather than from his lungs.
Is the Right Honorable Gentleman not aware that in the eyes of the world, and no doubt to the immense comfort of our fascist enemies, the slaughter of these innocents is as much an indictment of Britain’s honor as it is a monument to the bestiality of the Mufti’s followers? Has he no explanation to offer, however craven or cynical [his voice rose, cutting through the angry cries and countercries], of the shameful decision for which he himself will be answerable to history, for the precipitate withdrawal of our forces across the Jordan, thereby causing this desperate flight of the Jews into the hands of their executioners?
As Bevan sat abruptly down, Churchill came slowly to his feet.
The Honorable Member for Ebbw Vale will not, I fancy, be writing the history of this war—at least not for any publisher or institution with a reputation to cherish and inelastic financial reserves. [Over the Tory laughter, sharp cries of “Answer the question!” broke from the Labor benches.]
However [Churchill growled on] since the question just put to me so gravely impugns the honor of the Eighth Army—
The eruption of dissenting voices smothered his next words and he fell silent, glowering at the Opposition benches but standing his ground, refusing to give way to Bevan, who had sprung again to his feet.
“On a point of order, Mr. Speaker!”
Churchill glanced leftward at the Speaker, hesitated a moment, then backed away slightly, making it clear he was going to suffer only the briefest of interruptions.
The Right Honorable Gentleman once again demonstrates his unrivaled talent for distorting the words of his critics. It is not the honor of the Eighth Army I am calling in question. It is the decision made at War Cabinet level and dictated to General Alexander by the Right Honorable Gentleman himself—to abandon the Jews of Palestine to their fate—that has dishonored this nation and brought contumely on the Eighth Army in the eyes of the world. I invite the Right Honorable Gentleman to cut out the feeble attempts at humor and address himself to the question.
This time, the shouts of “Hear! Hear!” from the pro-Bevan faction brought no counter cries from the government back benches. Clearly sensing the unease of his supporters, the Prime Minister bent an ear to the urgent whispering of Clement Attlee before taking up his position once more at the dispatch box.
Let me remind those who might have been moved to question my own motives in this matter that a secure and independent Jewish homeland has long been one of the most cherished objectives of my political life. I was publicly espousing the cause of Zionism [he went on, raising his voice angrily over the supporting murmurs of his party stalwarts] when those who slander me from the benches opposite were furiously denouncing that great concept as a stumbling block on the road towards a Third International!
As he waited for the loud Tory cheering to subside, he glared across at Aneurin Bevan, who remained seated, his chubby face void of all expression.
“Answer the question!” It was a solitary, unspirited cry from the rear of the Opposition front bench. Churchill put his spectacles back on and planted himself squarely before the dispatch box, grasping it with both hands as he scanned his notes.
The issue as to whether the eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean could be defended was in fact decided against us when the British Fleet was driven from that sea following the loss of its bases in Malta, Cyprus and Alexandria and the fall of Gibraltar. There was of course a further consideration that was weighing heavily on all our minds, and that was the fate of those noncombatant Palestinian Jews and those refugees from Nazi Europe largely concentrated in the coastal cities of Haifa and Tel Aviv. The obvious solution was a mass evacuation. But to where? And by what means? President Roosevelt’s plea to Hitler to allow a mercy fleet of American ships safe passage up the Red Sea and into the Gulf of Aqaba had already been rejected. Approaches were then made by the International Red Cross to Turkey, the nearest neutral and non-Arab state to Palestine. These talks were conducted in secret with the President of the Republic himself, Ismet Inonu, who appeared at first to be receptive to the idea of providing temporary sanctuary, provided the operation cost him nothing.
It was therefore arranged for the first convoy of trucks, motor coaches and ambulances, escorted by Red Cross officials, to make the three-hundred-mile journey northwards along the coasts of the Lebanon and Syria. The attack on that unarmed convoy as it crossed the frontier with Syria was, I feel sure, as abominable to President Inonu as it was to decent people everywhere. But the fact that it was carried out by Mujahidin irregulars, under direct orders from the Mufti, caused Inonu to reconsider his arrangement with the Red Cross. Had Ataturk still been alive, there can be little doubt that Turkey’s frontiers would have remained open, even to armed convoys of Palestinian refugees. But his successor, alas, is a man of different mettle. At this point, while British and American Red Cross officials in Geneva were grappling with the well-nigh impossible logistics of a Jewish exodus across Transjordan and Iraq to the Persian Gulf, Rommel thrust north, threatening our positions at the Khatmia Pass and at Romani, on the coastal road to Palestine. This breakthrough by Rommel was also the signal for Rashid Ali to emerge from his funk-hole and incite his Iraqi followers to the foul murder of the boy King Faisal the Second and the Regent Emir Abdul Illah. The Commander-in-chief in the Middle East reported to me as follows. [Churchill fingered a sheet of paper from the notes lying before him and
cleared his throat before reading aloud.] “Palestine can now be defended only at the ultimate cost of the entire Eighth Army. Our next line of defense is the Dead Sea and the east bank of the Jordan. The Jewish Command’s decision, already conveyed to you, remains unchanged.”
That decision [Churchill went on] was to defend the all-Jewish city of Tel Aviv, with its remaining civilian population, if necessary to the last man, and to make clear this intention to the Germans, in the hope that as a condition of laying down their arms the safety and freedom of the civilian population would be guaranteed.
In the light of events, that might seem to be an heroic but absurdly deluded course of action. But there was good reason to believe that Rommel would bring pressure upon Hitler to accept this offer, and in fact this is precisely what did happen. It is to Rommel’s credit that the Afrika Korps has been totally committed to the pursuit of the Eighth Army and that he has refused all military involvement with the Arab forces now assailing Tel Aviv. For our part, and on my express orders, we left every ton of war material we could spare to the valiant Jewish defenders before our forces withdrew from Palestine. But their days, alas, are numbered. There can, I fear, be only one outcome in this sector of the Middle-East battlefield. And the civilized world, Mister Speaker, sickened as it is by the monstrous infamies already perpetrated by Hitler’s Germany, must now brace itself for the carnage that is surely to come. . . .
The Prime Minister had paused, whether out of emotion or to take breath it was not clear, when a sound no living member could recall ever hearing in the debating chamber of the House of Commons, tortured the deep silence. All heads, it seemed, were turning toward the slight fair-haired figure of Sidney Silverman, seated immediately to the left of Aneurin Bevan—all heads except that of Churchill and of the Welshman himself. The member for Nelson and Colne was sobbing, head bowed, hands limply folded in his lap. Bevan’s left arm came slowly up and around his neighbor’s shoulders in a tight embrace.
CHAPTER FIVE
AS HITLER’S armored train, nine coaches long, came slowly to a standstill in the railway station of Berchtesgaden, Doctor Otto Dietrich, Reich Press Director and chief spokesman for the Fuehrer’s headquarters, flopped into the vacant seat opposite Kurt and offered the younger man a patronizing smile.
“Excited, Armbrecht?”
“I suppose so. It’s taken me eighteen months to get here, after all.”
The arrival platform was now seething with troops of the SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, scrambling from their coaches at the front and rear of the train. Reluctantly, Kurt switched his attention back to Dietrich. He had had less contact, possibly, with the press chief than with any of Hitler’s aides since joining the Chancellery staff, and such contacts as they had made could hardly have been classed as cordial. In eighteen months, without going out of his way to solicit Chancellery gossip, Kurt had become aware of the petty rivalries and incessant elbowing for power between individuals and ad hoc groupings of individuals attached to the court of Adolf Hitler. And however true it might be that he himself, unmoved by executive greed, remained above—or, more precisely, below—this squalid maneuvering for favor, the fact remained that he had been Goebbels’s candidate for the post of literary secretary, and between Dietrich and Goebbels there was now only the frostiest of relationships. They had been contemporaries and alte Kaempfer of the party in its early struggles, and in principle there need have been no friction between them on the executive level. In practice, however, Dietrich had been taking it upon himself, using Hitler’s authority, to issue directives bearing upon certain sudden news “breaks” without bothering to consult the Minister, and there had now been several instances in which the unfortunate night staff of Room 24 at the Ministry had had to decide either to sit tight on two urgent and conflicting directives, thereby missing the editions, or else to put out only one of them, in which case it was inevitably the policy line from the Fuehrer’s HQ spokesman that colored the editorials, often to the dismay and fury of Goebbels, the unchallenged maestro of Reich propaganda.
A particularly blatant example of this had been the handling, or rather mishandling, of Pope Pius XII’s cable to Hitler, ten months back, when the Jewish redoubts of Haifa and Tel Aviv had broadcast their surrender offer to the Waffen SS. The Pope’s cable, as protocol required, had been presented that morning to Joachim von Ribbentrop at the Foreign Ministry by the Papal Nuncio in Berlin, Cesare Cardinal Orsenigo, for transmission to the German Fuehrer in his advanced southern-Russian headquarters. At the same time, Orsenigo had politely informed Ribbentrop that the text of the Pope’s message—a mildly worded appeal for the Jewish defenders to be afforded Geneva Convention status as prisoners of war—would be released by the Vatican press office eight hours after its delivery to the Foreign Minister. Immediately after telegraphing the text to the Fuehrer, Ribbentrop had got on the telephone to Goebbels. The two men agreed that the German press and radio should be given a “mark time” policy directive that night and that the general line should be that it would be for the Fuehrer, as Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, to decide the terms for surrender, including the status of those laying down their arms.
The early morning radio bulletins and commentaries adhered strictly to this restrained and, by Nazi standards, unprovocative line. But the national press tore into the Pope’s appeal like ravenous wolves. By what distortions of the accepted rules of warfare, it asked, could honorable prisoner-of-war status be given to a rabble of saboteurs and stateless aggressors operating behind the lines of a national army locked in combat with the forces of a formally declared enemy? Was it in the Pope’s province to rewrite the Geneva Articles?
The ensuing slaughter of the Jewish combatants and the following month-long “reduction” of the surviving civilian population by two of Eichmann’s Einsatzgruppen were now correctly seen by the neutral nations of the world as premeditated acts of barbarism. To Reichsminister Goebbels, the whole affair was a propaganda disaster. It had also provided Churchill with all the moral support he needed—internally and abroad—in rejecting the “olive branch” offered by Hitler in Jerusalem on March 7. But the Doctor’s vigorous protest to Hitler had been so toned down by the ever-vigilant Martin Bormann as to have warranted no more than a “Seen and noted” comment from the Fuehrer.
Dietrich’s smile had broadened at Kurt’s answer. “You can count yourself lucky the Chief’s been so tied up elsewhere these past eighteen months. Take it from me, two weeks isolated up on that mountain are going to strain your loyalty to the breaking point.”
“I doubt that. Remember, I was born in these parts.” He snatched a glance along the platform, where some of the top brass of Hitler’s entourage, including OKW chief, Feldmarschall Keitel, chief adjutant Julius Schaub, SS Oberfuehrer Rattenhuber, head of security, and Gruppenfuehrer Fegelein, Himmler’s permanent representative at the Fuehrerhauptquartier, were forming into groups on either side of the red carpet laid down for Berchtesgaden’s most illustrious patron.
“It’s not the Bavarian Alps I’m talking about, Herr Captain. It’s life at the Berghof.” Dietrich simulated a huge yawn, drooping his eyelids. “A petty-bourgeois paradise, if ever there was one.” His eyes opened and the grin returned, this time more spiteful than benign. “Pity you couldn’t wangle accommodation for that charming secretary of yours. There’s an abysmal shortage of pretty young females up on that mountain.”
Kurt could have retorted, deadpan, that Helga was taking a part of her annual leave, over Christmas and the New Year. He could have said, rising playfully to Dietrich’s lewd dig, that he himself needed a rest from Helga’s sexual demands. Both comments would have been valid. But, seeing no profit in this line of banter, he switched back to the press chief’s earlier remark.
“ ‘Petty-bourgeois’ seems a curious term to use—I mean, of the Berghof.”
Dietrich shrugged. “Semantics is our business, Armbrecht— both yours and mine—and if you can offer a more apt description, after a couple
of lunch and tea sessions up there, I’ll be glad to hear it.” He pushed back his cuff to squint at his wrist watch. “Five more minutes for Erich Kempka to get the Chief’s Mercedes off the train and another five for Hoffman to take his blasted pictures of the local Kreisleiter’s little poppets handing out the edelweiss, and we ought to be off and away. Be a good fellow and shake me awake when you see Bormann out there, fussing about.” And, with that, Dietrich slipped off into what, to all intents and purposes, was a light coma.
Kurt’s own eyelids were prickling from the fatigue of the long train journey, which had begun at Berlin just after midnight and had afforded no sleep for any of the entourage until after 2 a.m., when the last of the company summoned to the Fuehrer’s rosewood-paneled parlor car returned, heavy-eyed, with the welcome news that the Fuehrer’s orderly, Bussman, was about to put him to bed. After breakfasting at dawn in the dining car, Kurt had returned to his designated seat in the third coach down from Hitler’s and opened the envelope marked “Bormann-Vermerke No. 445.” The date was Friday, 3 December, 1943; the report was exactly a week old. It was of the Fuehrer’s remarks at a lunch party in the Chancellery, with Feldmarschall Erwin Rommel as guest of honor. There was an introductory note by Martin Bormann:
Feldmarschall Rommel had commented on yesterday’s (unconfirmed) report in the Swedish press that Sir Stafford Cripps had been involved in secret discussions in the capital of Afghanistan with the Soviet Foreign Minister, Molotov, with the presumed approval of King Zahir Shah. If this were true, he asked the Fuehrer, might it not call for an urgent reappraisal of the Teheran Agreement with Japan? The Fuehrer replied:
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