A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Today is Sunday, September 1, 2019. As I write this, it's hot, muggy, and cloudy in my corner of the world. And as Hurricane Dorian churns toward the northern Bahamas as a monster Category Five storm, we Floridians are keeping a wary watch. Most of the forecast tracks are predicting that Dorian will head west for a bit, then turn north and stay just off Florida's East Coast as it makes its destructive way toward Georgia and the Carolinas. I wish I could say for sure that my area is totally out of the woods; I know that my former hometown of Miami is probably not going to be affected because Dorian's eye is already almost parallel to northern Broward/southern Palm Beach Counties. But if the storm doesn't turn to the north within the next 24-36 hours, its outer bands will affect Central Florida and maybe even the Tampa Bay area in some way. Per the National Hurricane Center's 11 AM advisory: SUMMARY OF 1100 AM EDT...1500 UTC...INFORMATION ------------------...

Could Hitler have been considered "good" in any way? Some argue he wasn't really evil as he really believed and followed his beliefs and thought he was right in his actions. No. Not in the slightest. There is no redeeming factor in Adolf Hitler’s life as a dictator and Commander in Chief of the Greater German Reich’s armed forces that can be even considered to be “good.” It’s amazing (and, frankly, appalling) that three-quarters of a century after the final campaigns to liberate Europe from Nazi domination, there still exist many people all around the world - including citizens of the Allied nations that waged war against the Third Reich - that think Hitler was a well-intentioned man who loved Germany and merely wanted to save Western Civilization from the scourge of Communism. It’s a matter of historical record that Adolf Hitler adored his mother Klara, was good to dogs, was kind to German children (except those who were Jewish or were related to his political...

No. One of the main pillars of National Socialism was persecution of ethnic, social, and religious minorities, not only in Germany proper but in Europe on a continental level. You have to keep in mind that Adolf Hitler’s goals were not simply to establish a one-party regime, “right the wrongs” that Germany perceived had been done to her after World War I, and rearm for self-defense. As early as the mid-1920s, Hitler stated his goals of destroying Jewish-Bolshevism, creating a Greater German Reich by conquering neighboring countries, and eventually invading the Soviet Union. You also need to remember that Hitler did not “trick” ordinary Germans into following him, even when he made that leap into the abyss and invaded Poland in September of 1939. Many dedicated Nazis, including women and teenagers, were ecstatic at the outbreak of war and continued believing in  der Fuhrer  till the fortunes of war turned against their “Thousand Year Reich.” (Ordinary Germans, on the o...

Why did Nazi Germany concentrate her armed forces on the Eastern Front against the Soviet Union in World War II? Aside from the fact that to the Nazis the Soviet Union was the principal enemy? There were several reasons, really. First, you must remember that by Adolf Hitler’s calculations, Great Britain was on the ropes and unable to reverse her defeat in Western Europe a year earlier. Yes, the Royal Air Force  had  defeated Germany’s  Luftwaffe  in the Battle of Britain and the Royal Navy was still a force to be contended with. But with Britain’s army scattered hither and yon in North Africa, India, and its Imperial holdings everywhere, it would take years for Churchill to field a land force strong enough to open a Second Front in the West. (Hitler was a land-bound “strategist” and failed to recognize that if he lost the air war  and  the Battle of the Atlantic, his Reich was doomed.) Second, Hitler was counting on continued American neu...

© 2011 Penguin Press On September 8, 2011, Penguin Press published the first edition of Sir Ian Kershaw's The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1944-1945. It is an in-depth scholarly look at the psychological, political, and socio-cultural factors that allowed Adolf Hitler's Third Reich to resist the Allied onslaughts on all fronts (the West, the East, and Italy) during the last 10 months of World War II in Europe. Written by the renowned author of a two-volume biography of Hitler and other books about Nazi Germany,  The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1944-1945 tackles a subject that, at best, is only tangentially covered in other works that focus on the military campaigns that took place between July of 1944 and the spring of 1945 or, in Max Hastings' pithy phrase, "bunker porn" that describes in lurid details, the last 10 days of Hitler's wretched life in Berlin. In retrospect, it is amazing that a r...

The answer is simple. Adolf Hitler took a huge gamble….and lost. For the first two years of the Second World War, Hitler’s policy toward the U.S. was to hope that isolationism, anti-British sentiment in certain segments of the American public, and internal divisions would keep President Franklin D. Roosevelt too busy to enter the conflict before he had conquered the Soviet Union. He may have believed that FDR, who was clearly a supporter of Great Britain, would lose the 1940 Presidential election to a candidate who would be more accommodating to German hegemony in Europe. Hitler was none too thrilled when the Roosevelt Administration and a bipartisan Congress passed the Lend-Lease Act and sent the U.S. Navy to escort convoys as far as Iceland. But even when this led to an undeclared naval war in the Atlantic, the German dictator still held off from declaring war on America. Why? Partly because Hitler suspected that it would take the...

Cover for the 1993 paperback edition. (C) 1993 HarTorch Books On May 26, 1992, Random House published the U.S. edition of Fatherland, the debut of novelist Robert Harris, formerly a writer and editor for the BBC and the newspaper The Observer. Previously known for his non-fiction works ( Gotcha! The Government, the Media, and the Falklands Crisis and Selling Hitler ), Harris went on to become aa author of novels, most of them which have historical themes. An "alternate history" work along the lines of Alfred Coppel's The Burning Mountain: A Novel of the Invasion of Japan, Fatherland depicts a dystopian version of Germany in 1964 as the victor of World War II in Europe. Set between April 14-20 in 1964, Fatherland begins with a murder investigation. Berlin Kriminalpolizei (Kripo) detective Xavier March is called to the shores of the Havel River on the outskirts of Hitler's redesigned (by his favorite architect, Albert Speer) capital of Berlin. A corpse of an elder...

1976-era paperback book cover. (C) 1976 Bantam Books It is November 1943. The Second World War is in its fourth year. Adolf Hitler's Third Reich is fending off Allied advances in the Eastern Front and in Italy. German cities are being bombed "around the clock" by the American and British air forces. Across the English Channel, the Anglo-American forces are marshaling troops and making plans for history's greatest amphibious operation, which is tentatively scheduled for May of 1944. But even though Germany has suffered great defeats in North Africa and the vast territories of the Soviet Union, Hitler still hopes to win the war. Desperately seeking a significant propaganda victory and inspired by the rescue of fellow dictator Benito Mussolini by a team of German special forces, the Fuhrer (egged on by SS chief Heinrich Himmler) orders the head of Military Intelligence ( Abwehr ) to carry out an even more daring special forces mission: to capture British Pri...

Dust jacket illustration for the U.S. edition of Ardennes 1944: The Battle of the Bulge. Design by Matt Yee. (C) 2015 Viking (a Penguin Random House imprint) On November 3, 2015, Penguin Random House UK imprint Viking published Ardennes 1944: Hitler’s Last Gamble , a book by historian Antony Beevor about the biggest battle fought in Western Europe during World War II. Officially known as the Ardennes Counteroffensive, the engagement that began on December 16, 1944 and ended six weeks later is better known by its more popular nomenclature – the Battle of the Bulge. (The battle earned its nickname due to the bulge-shaped salient in Allied lines on situation maps – official and those published in U.S. and British newspapers during that cold, miserable, and violent winter battle.) Published in the U.S. as Ardennes 1944: The Battle of the Bulge, the book is Beevor’s first World War II book that focuses on a campaign that was overwhelmingly a struggle between Adolf Hitler’s We...

Because of my long-time interest in the topic of World War II, I have watched countless dramas, action-adventures, biopics and documentaries which focus on history's biggest and deadliest clash of arms. Sometimes, of course, I watch World War II movies merely to be entertained; there are lots of movies set during the war that have no greater "mission" than to raise one's adrenaline levels ( The Dirty Dozen, Von Ryan's Express ) or get guffaws out of the audience ( The Pigeon That Took Rome, What Did You Do in the War, Daddy? ). Most of the time, however, I tend to seek some sort of enlightenment, understanding or inspiration - sometimes in purely fictional accounts of men in combat ( Saving Private Ryan, Memphis Belle ), and sometimes in "based on the true story" films that try, within the paradigm of commercial filmmaking, to recreate historical events that took place during the war. Naturally, to get any understanding about the causes and consequenc...