Category Archives: History

Arts, Books, History

Book Review: The Guinea Pig Club

REVIEW

IN the summer of 1940, during the early stages of the Battle of Britain, 21-year-old Geoffrey Page’s Hawker Hurricane was hit by several stray bullets from a German bomber. The gas tank behind the plane’s engine exploded and turned the cockpit into a blazing inferno.

“Fear became blind terror,” he recalled, “then agonised horror as the bare skin of my hands gripping the throttle and control column shrivelled up like burnt parchment under the intensity of the blast furnace temperature.

“Screaming at the top of my voice, I threw my head back to keep it away from the searing flames.”

With instinctiveness, Page’s tortured right hand groped for the safety harness and it was only as his parachute descended towards the sea that he noticed: “The colour of my burned flesh was so loathsome that I wanted to vomit. But there was too much to attend to.

“The coastline at Margate was just discernible six to ten miles away. Ten thousand feet below me lay the deserted sea . . . I began to laugh. The force of the exploding gas tank had blown every vestige of clothing off my thighs downwards, including one shoe.”

After Page hit the water, pieces of his flesh flaked off and floated away. His blood ebbed into the brine. His pain worsened after he had been rescued by a British merchant ship and he felt “acute misery” as “the salt dried about my face injuries and the contracting strap of the flying helmet cut into the raw surface of my chin.

“Buckle and leather had welded into one solid mass, preventing removal of the headgear.”

On arrival at the RAF’s main hospital in Halton, Page looked away as the medics injected morphine and, in doing so, caught sight of his reflection in the mirrors of the overhanging light.

“My last conscious memory was of seeing the hideous mass of swollen, burnt flesh that had once been a face.”

 

BUT Page was lucky. Before World War II, most serious burn victims died within days from a particularly virulent form of shock or unchecked infection. They were not even admitted to teaching hospitals for fear the hopelessness of their plight would dent the young medics’ morale.

But, by 1940, a series of clinical breakthroughs in the treatment of both burn shock and infection prevention saw a surge in the number of men surviving long enough to require the services of the four plastic surgeons then practising in the UK.

Chief among them was the extraordinary Archibald McIndoe, who treated casualties such as Page at a special hospital in East Grinstead. To be played by Richard E. Grant in a biopic scheduled for release this year, New Zealand-born McIndoe was not only a brilliant and innovative surgeon, but a hugely compassionate – and rather eccentric – character who never lost sight of the human beings within the battered bodies that he repaired.

McIndoe was ahead of the game in helping these men find comradeship. He often told jokes and encouraged his nurses to serve beer on the wards and by taking the time to chat. His 649 RAF patients were equal partners in their own treatment, invited to view operations, give honest feedback and support each other as part of a “Guinea Pig Club” (GPC), who continued to meet right up until 2007.

In this updated edition of her short and tender account of the GPC, Emily Mayhew reminds us that World War II changed Britain’s view of heroism.

Before 1939, we celebrated great battlefield victories. After 1939, we learned to celebrate the quiet, gruelling valour of those who pushed on with civilian life, despite the horrors they had seen and the horror they saw in the eyes of those shocked by their burned bodies.

“Those first sorties into the world outside the hospital were painful,” remembered Bill Simpson. “Without hands, for instance, it was embarrassing to have someone pouring beer down your throat, wiping your mouth, blowing your nose, handling your money. It was even more embarrassing to have to make for the gentlemen’s cloakroom in pairs.”

“Before 1940,” writes Mayhew, “the Armed Forces contained their most disfigured casualties away from the public gaze.”

However, Archibald McIndoe changed that: he made sure that his patients were treated with warmth and dignity by the people of East Grinstead.

His Guinea Pigs were served in cafes, invited to dances and billeted in local houses.

The community was considered so therapeutic that patients were actively discouraged from going home sooner than necessary.

McIndoe fought, too, for the employment rights of his patients. Prior to the war, the convalescent period was restricted to 90 days with full pay, after which the patient had to return to active service or leave the RAF.

This rule was quickly scrapped and, eventually, airmen undergoing plastic surgery remained on full pay until the end of their treatment.

McIndoe also refused to give his patients the regulation Convalescent Blue uniforms, encouraging them to dress in regular uniform in acknowledgement of the battle that they were still fighting.

Many Guinea Pigs did return to active service – Geoffrey page among them. After two years of treatment, he headed back into combat, determined to shoot down an enemy plane for every one of his 15 major operations.

At his funeral in August 2000, Air Chief Marshal Sir Christopher Foxlee-Norris declared: “Even by the Battle of Britain standards, he was the bravest of the brave.”

– The Guinea Pig Club, by Emily Mayhew, is published by Greenhill for £17.99, 240pp

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Arts, History, Philosophy

(Philosophy): Machiavelli on Religion and Faith

‘THE PRINCE’

Machiavelli, (1469-1527): ‘God is not willing to do everything, and thus take away our free will and that share of glory which belongs to us.’

MACHIAVELLI was an Italian philosopher, politician and historian, who is regarded as the father of political science and of philosophical idealism. Prior to Machiavelli, the prominent form of philosophy had been idealism, but Machiavelli, born during the Italian Renaissance period, adopted a more objective, realist view of mankind, examining how the world was as opposed to ideals of how it should be.

Machiavelli described his political philosophy in The Prince (1513). The term ‘Machiavellian’ is often used to describe political leaders who seize power through cunning opportunism and unscrupulous means and has often been applied to despotic dictators presiding over cruel and callous regimes. However, many critics and scholars have argued that The Prince has been largely misinterpreted as a supposed guidebook of totalitarian tactics. The text’s analysis of how to gain and maintain political power has been overemphasised to the detriment of some of the more politically moderate viewpoints. The Prince is in fact an intricately layered, complex analysis of the human condition, encompassing a critique of religious doctrines and ethics, as much as it is a treatise on the acquisition of power.

Machiavelli was writing during a period of extreme political volatility in his native state of Florence and it is possible that The Prince is a direct result of Machiavelli’s frustration with the constant warmongering and insurrections. The principle theme of The Prince concerns a treatise on what makes an effective ruler (the prince of the title). In contrast to earlier philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle, who both believed political power was a divine right, Machiavelli argued that power was there for any person who had the ability to seize it. Machiavelli’s philosophy focused on the end result, not the means used to attain power, which he believed were irrelevant to the outcome. Machiavelli suggested that there are two forms of morality or virtue: those adopted by the ruler (the prince) and those adhered to by his subjects. The prince’s morality should be governed not by universal virtues or religious doctrines but be judged by his effectiveness as a ruler. In making political decisions the only factor that the prince should consider is which outcome will be most beneficial for the stability of his state and the maintenance of his power.

Although Machiavelli seemed to be advocating a separation of church and state, he nonetheless recognised the important role religion must play in maintaining order. For Machiavelli it was wise for the prince to present himself to his people as religious and virtuous even if, in practice, he was not. Having served and witnessed at first hand the brutal regime of Cesare Borgia, son of Pope Alexander VI, Machiavelli recognised the Catholic Church as a powerful, albeit corrupt tool for controlling the people. Indeed, Machiavelli used Cesare Borgia as an example of a ruler who was cunning and clever in his quest to attain power. Although the Borgias relied upon Papal patronage to maintain their power, Machiavelli refuted the belief that the actions of a ruler simply upheld the will of God on earth, claiming that man can (and does) exercise free will for his own ends, with or without the implicit consent of God or religion.

Although there are some dubious elements presented in The Prince, not least the advocation of cruelty and murder as a legitimate means to gain power, Machiavelli’s work represents a radical shift from idealism to realism and stands as a historically important reflective commentary on the political culture of the time in which it was written.

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Arts, Books, History, Literature

Book Review: Reckonings

HOLOCAUST

Intro: Up to a million people were involved in the extermination of Jews in Hitler’s death camps, yet only a paltry 6,600 were convicted

THE recent publication of Reckonings, Mary Fulbrook’s monumental account of the attempt to bring the perpetrators of the Holocaust to justice, is propitious in its timing. It coincides with the rise in anti-Semitism.

The British historian has already won acclaim for her earlier work, A Small Town Near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis And The Holocaust. This latest volume deserves awards, too.

As with all detailed work related to the Nazis’ programme of exterminating the entire European Jewish population, a prospective reader should be warned: the depravity described is almost impossible to read. It is disturbing.

But it is a sense of deep injustice, as well as horror, that will eventually overcome readers of Reckonings. Its main theme is how the overwhelming majority of those involved in the murder of an estimated six million men, women and children were either never brought to justice or were dealt with so leniently that it amounted to the victims being gravely insulted.

Fulbrook estimates that “perhaps 200,000 people, and possibly closer to a million, were at one point or another actively involved in killing Jewish civilians. And the ranks of those who made this possible were far wider”.

The solitary name of Auschwitz has become almost synonymous with the Holocaust and the mass murder of Jews, but there were around another 1,200 “sub-camps” spread across the Reich.

Yet, out of a total of 172,294 participants prosecuted, only 6,656 were convicted. And the overwhelming majority of those actually found guilty received sentences of less than two years’ imprisonment.

One reason for that was the astonishing efficiency of the Nazis’ methods. As Fullbrook duly observes, the West German courts, originally charged with bringing the perpetrators to justice, needed witnesses but “the more perfect the extermination machinery, the less likely the murderers were to be found guilty”.

For example, there were only two known survivors of the Belzec extermination camp, where an estimated half a million people had been gassed – and one of those survivors was killed in suspicious circumstances before he could give evidence.

Only one person, Josef Oberhauser, was convicted, in Munich in 1965, in connection with this mass slaughter.

 

THIRTEEN of the 14 witnesses called to testify in court were former SS personnel. But as Fulbrook writes, were “hardly likely to want to incriminate their former colleagues and in the process risk incriminating themselves”.

In general, the West German courts would acquit those who could make a case that they had little choice but to perform their role in the mass murder (though there are no records of anyone who was punished for refusing to participate).

Claims by many of the perpetrators that they had done their best to make the victims’ final moments more bearable were also treated as a mitigating factor.

The 1966 trial of Walter Thormeyer, a former SS Hauptscharfuhrer, provides a vivid and grotesque example. His deputy, Rudi Zimmermann, one of the miniscule number to display remorse and who actually turned himself in, told the court that, on the occasion of mass killings: “Thormeyer appeared to prefer shooting the female Jews personally… with a certain relish.”

In fact, Thormeyer had a Jewish mistress, but when he feared that this (a crime under Nazi law) would be discovered, he took her for a walk in some woods… and shot her in the back of the neck.

The judge declared that this was a token of Thormeyer’s “consideration”, and the act “humane” – because his mistress had been spared the knowledge that he was going to kill her.

Thormeyer was, at the time of his trial, an official in the West German court system and, as Fulbrook observes, one reason for the general lenience of the sentencing (Thormeyer himself got 12 years) was that the entire German legal bureaucracy was riddled with ex-Nazis.

The idea that the extermination camps were killing Jews “humanely”, by using gas, rather than bullets, was invariably suggested by those put-on trial afterwards, most notably Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz.

In his memoir, he wrote how “humane” this was: “I was relieved that we would be spared all these bloodbaths, and that the victims too would be spared suffering until their last moment came.” Such concern for the victims. Pah.

It was solely out of concern for the killers that mass shootings were supplanted by gassing. The splattering of the brains of women and children was said to have had a deleterious effect on the morale of all but the most depraved German (and, indeed, Austrian) executioners. And it was anything but a humane killing: the very use of the word in connection with mass extermination is itself utterly repulsive.

 

DURING one of her – thankfully rare – accounts of what actually happened, Fulbrook provides citation from one involved in the gassings at Treblinka, Chil Rajchman (whose main job was extracting gold fillings from the dead): “During their death agonies from asphyxiation the bodies also became swollen, so the corpses form literally a single mass.”

He observed that there were differences between the bodies recovered from the smaller and larger gas chambers: in the smaller chamber, death took 20 minutes, whereas in the larger chambers, it took three-quarters of an hour.

Corpses from the larger chambers “were horribly deformed, their faces all black as if burned, the bodies swollen and blue, the teeth so tightly clenched that it was impossible to open them”.

Which, as Rajchman observed, made his job of pulling out all those gold crowns even more difficult.

This is the process whose vast majority of active participants the post-war German courts exonerated on the basis that they were “only obeying orders”.

Yet, as Fulbrook summarises it, “obeying orders” was only one element.

There were also “varying combinations of careerism, cowardice, conformity, fear, lust, brutalisation, hopelessness”.

She adds to that list “desire for reward”. For yes, there were takings to be had from the desperate Jews, before exterminating them.

Obviously, modern-day Germany is not that of the immediate post-war period, when self-preservation and shame combined to hide and conceal the truth.

Yet, during 2018, the head of the increasingly popular Alternative for Deutschland party (AfD), Alexander Gauland, declared the crimes of Hitler and the Nazis to be just “a speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of glorious German history”.

Mary Fulbrook, or any reader who is repulsed at such comments, should send him a copy of her book.

. Reckonings by Mary Fulbrook is published by OUP for £25, 672pp

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