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Biography of the British diplomat who was Ambassador in Berlin when Hitler came to power. Tells the story of his youth, and all his diplomatic appointments, through private letters and diplomatic documents.
Whitehall and the Jews is the most comprehensive study to date of the British response to the plight of European Jewry under Nazism. It contains the definitive account of immigration controls on the admission of refugee Jews, and reveals the doubts and dissent that lay behind British policy. British self-interest consistently limited humanitarian aid to Jews. Refuge was severely restricted during the Holocaust, and little attempt made to save lives, although individual intervention did prompt some admissions on a purely humanitarian basis. After the war, the British government delayed announcing whether refugees would obtain permanent residence, reflecting the government's aim of avoiding long-term responsibility for large numbers of homeless Jews. The balance of state self-interest against humanitarian concern in refugee policy is an abiding theme of Whitehall and the Jews, one of the most important contributions to the understanding of the Holocaust and Britain yet published.
First published in 1922, this memoir provides a firsthand account of the diplomatic career of Horace Rumbold, who served as British ambassador to Germany and Austria-Hungary during the early part of the twentieth century. Rumbold's lively and engaging narrative offers a unique perspective on the events leading up to the First World War, as well as on the complex and often fraught relationships between major European powers at the time. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Discusses the attitudes and fluctuating policies of Winston Churchill towards the Jews and Zionism. Churchill attacked the 1905 Aliens Act, designed to restrict Jewish immigration to Britain. However, he may have been motivated partly by opportunism, as his Manchester constituency contained a high proportion of Jewish voters. He was not above exploiting antisemitism in an attack on Sir Marcus Samuel in 1914, accusing him of extorting high prices from the British Admiralty. Churchill was affected by "Jewish conspiracy" theories, and tended to accept the stereotype of the Jews' immense wealth and influence. Paradoxically, this may have played a role in his sympathy for Zionism. Churchill's supposed friendship with the Jews did not find expression in substantive actions on their behalf during the 1930s and World War II.
An in-depth look at the misguided foreign policy of appeasement towards Hitler and the Third Reich during World War II—from a world renowned historian. World War II and its attendant horrors arguably began in the British policy of appeasement of the Nazi rise to power between the First and Second World Wars. In this compelling work, Martin Gilbert walks the reader through several decades of behavior that, in retrospect, is hard to accept. Gilbert’s incisive focus on primary sources uncovers the real reasons for the appeasement policy, from the search for a just peace to attempts to avoid another war at all costs—illuminating the historical underpinnings of a fatally flawed policy and its tragic consequences for the Jewish people. This book also contains a chronology of appeasement policy as well as five specially drawn maps and five appendices—including a transcript of British statesman and politician David Lloyd George’s conversation with Hitler at Berchtesgaden in 1936.