Fact can often be stranger than fiction and this new book uncovers the story of British Fascists plotting with German POWs to assassinate Churchill in 1944. The author uncovered the surprising and unknown facts of this attempt by the British Fascists to seize power, take revenge on Churchill and hand WWII victory to Hitler. – Very Highly Recommended.
NAME: Hitler's Hangmen, The Secret German Plot To Kill Churchill, December 1944 FILE: R3112 AUTHOR: Brian Lett PUBLISHER: Greenhill Books BINDING: soft back PRICE: £19.99 GENRE: Non Fiction SUBJECT: WWII, World War II, World War 2, World War Two, Second World War, POW camps, prisoner discipline, SS, Nazi prisoners, Vehmic courts, British Fascists, Battle of the Bulge, POW escapees, Sir Oswald Mosley, Churchill, assassination
ISBN: 1-78383-117-0
PAGES: 236 IMAGE: B3112.jpg BUYNOW: tinyurl.com/rdr3mc6 DESCRIPTION: Fact can often be stranger than fiction and this new book uncovers the story of British Fascists plotting with German POWs to assassinate Churchill in 1944. The author uncovered the surprising and unknown facts of this attempt by the British Fascists to seize power, take revenge on Churchill and hand WWII victory to Hitler. – Very Highly Recommended. This serious potential threat developed as embittered British Fascists were released from jail and attempted to collaborate with German POWs held in camps in the British Isles. The plot was uncovered largely by accident but how likely it was to have succeeded is debatable at that point in the war. It is a reminder that through history there have been Britons prepared to betray their country and continue to present a level of threat as has been demonstrated during the BREXIT process when elements of the Establishment tried to overturn the democratic vote of the British people. Even after a referendum and two General Elections, quislings in the Civil Service continued to plot against the people and the elected Government. At any time, traitors can plot without being noticed and they are usually the same people, a mixture of the gullible, the thugs, the political extremists and the self- important. The British Fascists were a national socialist Party that included many high placed individuals, led by a man who had been a rising star in the first Labour Government until he fell out with fellow fascists on the Marxist wing of the Labour Party and went off to form the British Union of Fascists Party. Sir Oswald Moseley was impressed by Mussolini rather than by Hitler who was emerging from Mussolini's shadow at the time that Mosley was establishing his new Party. One of Churchill's first acts on becoming the wartime Prime Minister was to jail key members of the British Fascists, including Sir Oswald Mosley. It is clear that MI5 already had a very thick file on the membership of Mosley's Party and probably had a number of undercover agents embedded in it. For that reason, it is possible that discovery of the 1944 plot was not accidental and may even have been used by MI5 as part of the preparations for life after the war. In terms of whether the plot could have succeeded, Britain still had large numbers of US troops in country and, had Churchill been incapacitated by enemy action, treason or bad health, it is very likely that the Government would have survived under new leadership. The plot was related to Hitler's unrealistic hopes for his last throw Ardennes Offensive and may have suffered from his increasingly delusional behaviour. The Ardennes Offensive may have seen large numbers of the best German troops assembling without the Allies having detected them and were equipped with the best equipment available, but this strike was always potentially a very vulnerable situation for the Germans. It was stopped primarily because the weather cleared and the Germans started with insufficient fuel. The recovery and fierce defence mounted by US troops was also a strongly influential factor keeping the Germans away from the Allied fuel dumps they needed to plunder to continue their operation. With the clearing weather, always the most probable condition, allied air power swept in with rocket firing ground attack aircraft and bombers making mincemeat of those German vehicles still with enough fuel to be mobile. The POW situation is potentially much more debatable. Britain had followed a policy of moving POWs on to camps in North America, partly to avoid the need to dedicate more troops to guard duty and partly because it reduced the demand on supplies that had to be brought in by merchant convoys. For those prisoners, some hundreds of thousands in 1944, retained in camps in the British Isles, the guards were often drawn from the Free Forces in Britain, particularly Poles and the prisoners were allowed to establish their own management system run by SS and Nazi Partie members held in the camps. They were allowed to run their own courts and award punishments including execution by hanging. Whether this was a wise policy is open to debate but it has to be remembered that prisoners did not make home runs, as British prisoners in German camps regularly managed, and the manpower tied up in guarding German prisoners was remarkably light but successful. The author has undertaken extensive research and argues his points well. The modest photo-plate section is informative and includes full colour images. That this story was not covered better at the time or immediately after the war may seem a mystery but it has to be remembered that 1944-1946 it was a murky area of war history and the change from war to peace politics almost revolutionary. In this period the British coalition Government had agreed with Stalin to send back any Russian or Ukrainian POWs who had been caught serving the Germans, even though it was appreciated that they were likely to receive very harsh treatment. The incoming post-war Atlee Labour Government saw itself as a national socialist regime co-operating closely with the Soviet national socialist regime under Stalin, to the point where they were happy to send to Stalin examples of the most advanced military equipment developed in Britain during WWII. Mosley could no longer be restrained in the way that Churchill had done during the war and neither the Conservatives nor Labour wanted to give him any political oxygen.