The main Defence Regulations were the Defence (General) Regulations 1939, which were amended at various points throughout the war. Other Defence Regulations covered narrower fields of life. These included Defence Regulation 18B, which provided a framework for internment. 18B allowed the internment of people suspected of being Nazi sympathisers. The effect of 18B was to suspend the right of affected individuals to habeas corpus.
The Defence Regulations were Orders in Council and could amend any primary or secondary legislation within the limits of the enabling Acts to allow the effective prosecution of the war.
Originally the regulations did not create any capital offences, since the law of treason was thought to be sufficient. Defence Regulation 2A provided that "If, with intent to assist the enemy, any person does any act which is likely to assist the enemy or to prejudice the public safety, the defence of the realm or the efficient prosecution of the war, he shall be liable to penal servitude for life."
However, in 1940 amendments to the regulations created two capital offences: "forcing safeguards" (breaking through roadblocks etc.) under regulation 1B, and looting under regulation 38A. A third new capital offence, called treachery, was created soon afterwards by the Treachery Act 1940.
Since the emergency conditions created by the war persisted after the conflict was over, the last of the Defence Regulations, mainly those on food rationing, were not abolished until the early 1950s.
Most books about British traitors feature those who spied for Russia before and during the Cold War, making it easy to forget that we also spawned a few who worked for the Germans in the second world war. This book concerns four of them: John Amery, wastrel son of a Conservative cabinet minister; William Joyce, the Irish-American Nazi propagandist better known as Lord Haw-Haw; Harold Cole, soldier and petty criminal who sent 150 or more Resistance members to their deaths; and Eric Pleasants, a circus strong-man who disavowed national loyalties while donning German uniform.
Their motives were mixed but, treachery apart, they had one thing in common: an insistence on their own rightness and thus their entitlement to whatever they wanted at the expense of all others. ‘Sorry, old man, it’s just the luck of the war, you know,’ Cole said to a Frenchman as he betrayed him to torture and death.
Cole was an unprincipled, naturally treacherous and criminal self-seeker who betrayed anyone and anything whenever it suited him. Amery and Joyce were ideological enthusiasts for fascism which, Josh Ireland reminds us, was widely popular in sections of British society during the 1920s and 1930s. Although always a minority sport, Oswald Moseley’s Blackshirts had their own automobile club, holiday camps, weddings and even their own brand of cigarettes. Moseley, a former Labour minister and an accomplished orator, drew thousands to his meetings, preaching a populist socialist message in which he railed against housing conditions and called for ‘the conscious control and direction of human resources for human needs’. If that sounds familiar, it’s also worth noting that many on the Left were initially attracted by his call for action against weak and complacent governments allegedly in hock to the wealthy few.
Anti-Semitism was always part of the fascist package but in no one was it more virulent than in Joyce, a natural hater whose passions and contradictions are adeptly charted by Ireland. Amery was perhaps less ideological, his love affair with fascism arguably an extension of his rebellious, feckless and squalid youth. Seeing the rest of the world as sheep and himself as a heroic lone wolf, he took to drink and drugs, masochism and male prostitution, carried a gun and a teddy bear and had accumulated 74 motoring offences by the age of 24. Like Joyce, he regarded Britain as terminally decadent and felt justified in taking arms (by propagandising from Germany) against a nation that had failed to live up to what it should have been. He ended up in Germany attempting to recruit British prisoners of war to fight for the Germans, with negligible success.
Eric Pleasants, son of a Norfolk gamekeeper, was a weight-lifter and wrestler who had almost nothing in common with his fellow traitors. He didn’t drink, kept himself fit, felt no patriotic allegiance, was neither anti-Jewish nor anti-Bolshevist, indeed was virtually a pacifist — he joined the Peace Pledge Union, supporting appeasement. Nowadays he might have described himself as a citizen of the world. His creed was himself — that is, his right not to fight for or against anyone but to do as he pleased (which later included shooting dead a thief and beating a fellow prisoner to death). In Jersey when the Germans invaded, he forsook pacifism, joined the underground opposition and was caught and imprisoned in Germany. There he volunteered to join the British Free Corps, a doomed Nazi attempt to form a British SS unit (it mustered only 27). He later wrote that he joined to escape camp life and he certainly made the most of his freedoms until caught by the Russians postwar and sent to the gulag. Eventually deported to Britain, he was judged to have suffered enough and was allowed to return to Norfolk, where he lived a quiet life teaching judo and physical education.
The others met earlier ends, Amery and Joyce in appointments with Albert Pierrepoint, the hangman, and Cole in a gunfight with French police, a swifter end than he deserved. Ireland’s account of these men, at first slightly confusing because of his use of the buttonholing present tense and his often unexplained access to their thoughts, feelings and gestures, improves as the book goes on. He comments intelligently on their motives and describes enough of their worlds and views to give us essential context. He wisely doesn’t speculate about what would happen in equivalent circumstances now, but tells us enough to make it hard not to.
John Amery - Civilian - Guilty of treason, executed on 19 December 1945 George Johnson Armstrong - Civilian - Guilty of treachery, executed on 10 July 1941 Harold Cole - Soldier - A con man, thief and deserter who betrayed escaped airmen and French Resistance members to the Gestapo - killed by French Police 1945. Thomas Haller Cooper - member of Waffen-SS - Guilty of treason, sentence of death was commuted to life imprisonment - released 1953
Oswald John Job - Civilian - London-born son of German parents - "may well have been an informer" within St Denis internment camp- Guilty of treachery, executed on 16 March 1944. William Joyce - Civilian - Guilty of treason, executed on 3 January 1946. Nicknamed "Lord Haw-Haw" Dorothy O'Grady - Civilian - Guilty of treachery, sentenced to death but on appeal the sentence was commuted to 14 years’ penal servitude.
Roy Walter Purdy - Merchant Navy officer, propaganda broadcaster and informer at Colditz - guilty of treason - reports of his prosecution and trial in 'The Times' available at "reprieved on the grounds that [he] had been [a follower] in treason rather than [a leader] ... released from prison ... in December 1954... went to live with his ‘wife’ and child in Germany" - died in 1982. An alternative version is that 'Instead of trying to trace his German wife Margarete and his son, Purdy married his childhood sweetheart, never revealing his childhood past to his wife. For many years he worked as a quality control inspector in an Essex car factory. He died from lung cancer in 1982. A third version is that 'Walter Purdy was released from jail in 1954. He had a child called Stephan by a woman called Margaret Weitemeir born near Ravensbruck on 5 April 1945. Purdy planned to return to her but this never happened. He married his childhood sweetheart called Muriel in 1957 but she soon died. He married another lady in about 1960 and had a son. Walter Purdy died in Southend during 1982.'
Theodore Schurch - Soldier - Guilty of treachery, executed on 4 January 1946
Duncan Scott-Ford - Merchant seaman - Guilty of treachery, executed on 3 November 1942.
Alan Nunn May (2 May 1911 – 12 January 2003) was a British physicist, and a confessed and convicted Soviet spy, who supplied secrets of British and United States atomic research to the Soviet Union during World War II.
During World War II, he initially worked on radar in Suffolk, then with Cecil Powell in Bristol on a project that attempted to use photographic methods to detect fast particles from radioactive decay. James Chadwick recruited him to a Cambridge University team working on a possible heavy waterreactor. The team was part of the British Tube Alloys directorate which was merged into the American Manhattan Project, the successful effort to create a nuclear weapon. In January 1943 the Cambridge team including Nunn May transferred to the Montreal Laboratory which was building a reactor at Chalk River near Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. His Canadian job ended in September 1945, and he returned to his lecturing post in London.
He had let his membership of the Communist Party lapse by 1940, but at Cambridge when he saw an American report mentioning that Germany might be able to build a dirty bomb, he passed this on to a Soviet contact. In Canada he was approached by Lieutenant Angelov of the GRU (Soviet military intelligence) for information on atomic research. He continued his espionage by secretly supplying small samples of the isotopes Uranium-233 and 235. The courier of these samples was not informed of the danger of radiation and developed painful lesions. He subsequently needed lifelong regular blood transfusions. May also borrowed library research documents on nuclear power, many from the USA, for copying. The Canadian Royal Commission which later investigated said he was paid with two bottles of whiskey and at least $700 (Canadian); Nunn May said he accepted the money under protest and promptly burnt it. Angelov gave him details for a rendezvous with the GRU next to the British Museum in London after his return.
A GRU cipher clerk in Canada, Igor Gouzenko, defected to the West in Ottawa inSeptember 1945; this was right around the time when Nunn May's Canadian assignment ended. Gouzenko passed along copies of GRU documents implicating Nunn May, including details of the proposed meeting in London. Nunn May did not go to the British Museum meeting, but he was arrested in March 1946. Nunn May confessed to espionage. On 1 May 1946, he was sentenced to ten years' hard labour. He was released in late 1952, after serving six and a half years.
Camp X was the unofficial name of the secret Special Training School No. 103, a WW2 British paramilitary installation for training covert agents in the methods required for success in clandestine operations. It was located on the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario between Whitby and Oshawa in Ontario, Canada. The area is known today as Intrepid Park, after the code name for Sir William Stephenson, Director of British Security Co-ordination (BSC), who established the program to create the training facility.
The facility was jointly operated by the Canadian military, with help from Foreign Affairs and the RCMP but commanded by the BSC; it also had close ties with MI-6. In addition to the training program, the Camp had a communications tower that could send and transmit radio and telegraph communications, called Hydra.
Camp X was established December 6, 1941 by the chief of British Security Co-ordination (BSC), Sir William Stephenson, a Canadian from Winnipeg, Manitoba and a close confidant of Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The camp was originally designed to link Britain and the US at a time when the US was forbidden by the Neutrality Act to be directly involved in WW2.
However, even before the United States entered the war on December 8, 1941, agents from America's intelligence services expressed an interest in sending personnel for training at the soon to be opened Camp X. Agents from the FBI and the OSS (forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA) secretly attended Camp X in early 1942; at least a dozen attended at least some training.
After Stephenson established the facility and acted as the Camp's first head, the first commandant was Lt. Col. Arthur Terence Roper-Caldbeck. The most notable individual in the Camp's history was Colonel William "Wild Bill" Donovan, war-time head of the OSS, who credited Stephenson with teaching Americans about foreign intelligence gathering. The CIA even named their recruit training facility "The Farm", a nod to the original farm that existed at the Camp X site.
Camp X was jointly operated by the BSC and the Government of Canada. There were several names for the school: S 25-1-1 by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), Project-J by the Canadian military, and Special Training School No. 103. The latter was set by the Special Operations Executive, administered under the cover of the Ministry of Economic Warfare (MEW) which operated the facility. In 1942 the Commandant of the camp was Lieutenant R. M. Brooker of the British Army.
In addition to operating an excellent document forging facility, Camp X trained numerous Allied covert operatives. An estimate published by the CBC states that "By war's end, between 500 and 2,000 Allied agents had been trained (figures vary) and sent abroad..." behind enemy lines.
Reports indicate that graduates worked as "secret agents, security personnel, intelligence officers, or psychological warfare experts, serving in clandestine operations". Many were captured, tortured, and executed; survivors received no individual recognition for their efforts."
The predominant close-combat trainer for the British Special Operations Executive was William E. Fairbairn, called "Dangerous Dan". With instructor Eric A. Sykes, they trained numerous agents for the SOE and OSS. Fairbairn's technique was "Get down in the gutter, and win at all costs … no more playing fair … to kill or be killed."
"Trainees at the camp learned sabotage techniques, subversion, intelligence gathering, lock picking, explosives training, radio communications, encode/decode, recruiting techniques for partisans, the art of silent killing and unarmed combat."
One of the unique features of Camp X was Hydra, a highly sophisticated telecommunications relay station established in May 1942 by engineer Benjamin deForest Bayly. Bayly was the assistant director, with British army rank of lieutenant colonel. He also invented a very fast offline, one-time tape cipher machine for coding/decoding telegraph transmissions labelled the Rockex or "Telekrypton".
Communication training, including Morse code, was also provided. The camp was so secret that even Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King was unaware of its full purpose.
Traitors ..
After it had closed, starting in the autumn of 1945, Camp X was used by the RCMP as a secure location for interviewing Soviet embassy GRU cypher-clerk Igor Gouzenko, who had defected to Canada on September 5, 1945 (3 days after end of WW2) and revealed an extensive Soviet espionage operation in the country. Gouzenko provided 109 documents on the USSR′s espionage activities in the West. This forced Canada′s Prime Minister Mackenzie King to call a Royal Commission to investigate espionage in Canada.
Gouzenko exposed Soviet intelligence' efforts to steal nuclear secrets as well as the technique of planting sleeper agents. The "Gouzenko Affair" is often credited as a triggering event of the Cold War, with historian Jack Granatstein stating it was "the beginning of the Cold War for public opinion" and journalist Robert Fulford writing he was "absolutely certain the Cold War began in Ottawa". Granville Hicks described Gouzenko's actions as having "awakened the people of North America to the magnitude and the danger of Soviet espionage".
Gouzenko passed along copies of GRU documents implicating British physicist Nunn May, including details of the proposed meeting in London. Nunn May did not go to the British Museum meeting, but he was arrested in March 1946. Nunn May confessed to espionage. On 1 May 1946, he was sentenced to ten years' hard labour. He was released in late 1952, after serving six and a half years.
Gouzenko and his family spent two years at the Camp X facility.
The training facility closed before the end of 1944; the buildings were removed in 1969 and a monument was erected at the site.
Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess (16 April 1911 – 30 August 1963) was a British diplomat and Soviet agent, a member of the Cambridge Five spy ring that operated from the mid-1930s to the early years of the Cold War era. His defection in 1951 to the Soviet Union, with his fellow spy Donald Maclean, led to a serious breach in Anglo-United States intelligence co-operation, and caused long-lasting disruption and demoralisation in Britain's foreign and diplomatic services.
Burgess was recruited by Soviet intelligence in 1935, on the recommendation of the future double-agentHarold "Kim" Philby. Early in 1934 Arnold Deutsch, a longstanding Soviet secret agent, arrived in London under the cover of a research appointment at University College, London. Known as "Otto", his brief was to recruit the brightest students from Britain's top universities, who might in future occupy leading positions in British institutions. In June 1934 he recruited Philby, who had come to the Soviets' notice earlier that year in Vienna where he had been involved in demonstrations against the Dollfuss government. Philby recommended several of his Cambridge associates to Deutsch, including Maclean, by this time working in the Foreign Office. He also recommended Burgess, although with some reservations on account of the latter's erratic personality. Deutsch considered Burgess worth the risk, "an extremely well-educated fellow, with valuable social connections, and the inclinations of an adventurer". Burgess was given the codename "Mädchen", meaning "Girl", later changed to "Hicks". Burgess then persuaded Blunt that he could best fight fascism by working for the Soviets. A few years later another Apostle, John Cairncross, was recruited by Burgess and Blunt, to complete the spy ring often characterised as the "Cambridge Five".
After leaving Cambridge, Burgess worked for the BBC as a producer, briefly interrupted by a short period as a full-time MI6 intelligence officer, before joining the Foreign Office in 1944.
In July 1936, having twice previously applied unsuccessfully for posts at the BBC, Burgess was appointed as an assistant producer in the Corporation's Talks Department. Responsible for selecting and interviewing potential speakers for current affairs and cultural programmes, he drew on his extensive range of personal contacts and rarely met refusal. His relationships at the BBC were volatile; he quarrelled with management about his pay, while colleagues were irritated by his opportunism, his capacity for intrigue, and his slovenliness. One colleague, Gorley Putt, remembered him as "a snob and a slob ... It amazed me, much later in life, to learn that he had been irresistibly attractive to most people he met".
Old Broadcasting House, BBC's London HQ from 1932 (photographed in 2007)
Burgess also sought out Winston Churchill, then a powerful backbench opponent of the government's appeasement policy. On 1 October 1938, during the Munich crisis, Burgess, who had met Churchill socially, went to the latter's home at Chartwell to persuade him to reconsider his decision to withdraw from a projected talks series on Mediterranean countries. According to the account provided in Tom Driberg's biography, the conversation ranged over a series of issues, with Burgess urging the statesman to "offer his eloquence" to help resolve the current crisis. The meeting ended with the presentation to Burgess of a signed copy of Churchill's book Arms and the Covenant, but the broadcast did not take place.
Pursuing their main objective, the penetration of the British intelligence agencies, Burgess's controllers asked him to cultivate a friendship with the author David Footman, who they knew was an MI6 officer. Footman introduced Burgess to his superior, Valentine Vivian; as a result, over the following eighteen months Burgess carried out several small assignments for MI6 on an unpaid freelance basis. He was trusted sufficiently to be used as a back channel of communication between the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, and his French counterpart Edouard Daladier, during the period leading to the 1938 Munich summit.
At the BBC, Burgess thought his choices of speaker were being undermined by the BBC's subservience to the government – he attributed Churchill's non-appearance to this – and in November 1938, after another of his speakers was withdrawn at the request of the prime minister's office, he resigned.
As well as making programmes for the public, the wartime BBC was involved in a range of top secret activity, working with closely with the intelligence agencies and military.
MI6 was by now convinced of his future utility, and he accepted a job with its new propaganda division, known as Section D. In common with the other members of the Cambridge Five, his entry to British intelligence was achieved without vetting; his social position and personal recommendation were considered sufficient.
In mid-January 1941 Burgess rejoined the BBC Talks Department, while continuing to carry out freelance intelligence work, both for MI6 and its domestic intelligence counterpart MI5, which he had joined in a supernumerary capacity in 1940. After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the BBC required Burgess to select speakers who would depict Britain's new Soviet ally in a favourable light. He turned again to Blunt, and to his old Cambridge friend Jim Lees, and in 1942 arranged a broadcast by Ernst Henri, a Soviet agent masquerading as a journalist. No transcript of Henri's talk survives, but listeners remembered it as pure Soviet propaganda. In October 1941 Burgess took charge of the flagship political programme The Week in Westminster, which gave him almost unlimited access to Parliament. Information gleaned from regular wining, lunching and gossiping with MPs was invaluable to the Soviets, regardless of the content of the programmes that resulted. Burgess sought to maintain a political balance; his fellow Etonian Quintin Hogg, a future Conservative Lord Chancellor, was a regular broadcaster, as, from the opposite social and political spectrum, was Hector McNeil, a former journalist who became a Labour MP in 1941 and served as a parliamentary private secretary in the Churchill war ministry.
Burgess had lived in a Chester Square flat since 1935. From Easter 1941 he shared a house with Blunt and others at No. 5 Bentinck Street.
Burgess's casual work for MI5 and MI6 deflected official suspicion as to his true loyalties, but he lived in constant fear of exposure, particularly as he had revealed the truth to Goronwy Rees, a young Fellow of All Souls College, when trying to recruit the latter in 1937. ... Always seeking ways of further penetrating the citadels of power, when in June 1944 Burgess was offered a job in the News Department of the Foreign Office, he accepted it. The BBC reluctantly assented to his release, stating that his departure would be "a serious loss".
Rudolf Walter Richard Hess - Heß (26 April 1894 – 17 August 1987) was a German politician and a leading member of the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Nazi Germany. Appointed Deputy Führer to Adolf Hitler in 1933, Hess served in that position until 1941, when he flew solo to Scotland in a [purported] attempt to negotiate peace with the United Kingdom during WW2. He was taken prisoner and eventually convicted of crimes against peace, serving a life sentence until his suicide in 1987.
Concerned that Germany would face a war on two fronts as plans progressed for Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union scheduled to take place in 1941, Hess decided to attempt to bring Britain to the negotiating table by travelling there himself to seek meetings with the British government. He asked the advice of Albrecht Haushofer, who suggested several potential contacts in Britain. Hess settled on fellow aviator Douglas Douglas-Hamilton, the Duke of Hamilton, whom he had never met. On Hess's instructions, Haushofer wrote to Hamilton in September 1940, but the letter was intercepted by MI5 and Hamilton did not see it until March 1941. Hamilton was chosen in the mistaken belief that he was one of the leaders of a group opposed to war with Germany, and because he was a friend of Haushofer.
A letter Hess wrote to his wife dated 4 November 1940 shows that in spite of not receiving a reply from Hamilton, he intended to proceed with his plan. He began training on the Messerschmitt Bf 110, a two-seater twin-engine aircraft, in October 1940 under instructor Wilhelm Stör, the chief test pilot at Messerschmitt. He continued to practise, including logging many cross-country flights, and found a specific aircraft that handled well—a Bf 110E-1/N—which was from then on held in reserve for his personal use. He asked for a radio compass, modifications to the oxygen delivery system, and large long-range fuel tanks to be installed on this plane, and these requests were granted by March 1941.
After a final check of the weather reports for Germany and the North Sea, Hess took off at 17:45 on 10 May 1941 from the airfield at Augsburg-Haunstetten in his specially prepared aircraft. It was the last of several attempts to depart on his mission; previous efforts had to be called off due to mechanical problems or poor weather. Wearing a leather flying suit bearing the rank of captain, he brought along a supply of money and toiletries, a torch, a camera, maps and charts, and a collection of 28 different medicines, as well as dextrose tablets to help ward off fatigue and an assortment of homeopathic remedies.
Initially setting a course towards Bonn, Hess used landmarks on the ground to orient himself and make minor course corrections. When he reached the coast near the Frisian Islands, he turned and flew in an easterly direction for twenty minutes to stay out of range of British radar. He then took a heading of 335 degrees for the trip across the North Sea, initially at low altitude, but travelling for most of the journey at 5,000 feet (1,500 m). At 20:58 he changed his heading to 245 degrees, intending to approach the coast of North East England near the town of Bamburgh, Northumberland. As it was not yet sunset when he initially approached the coast, Hess backtracked, zigzagging back and forth for 40 minutes until it grew dark. Around this time his auxiliary fuel tanks were exhausted, so he released them into the sea. Also around this time, at 22:08, the British Chain Home station at Ottercops Moss near Newcastle upon Tyne detected his presence and passed along this information to the Filter Room at Bentley Priory. Soon he had been detected by several other stations, and the aircraft was designated as "Raid 42".
Two Spitfires of No. 72 Squadron RAF, No. 13 Group RAF that were already in the air were sent to attempt an interception, but failed to find the intruder. A third Spitfire sent from Acklington at 22:20 also failed to spot the aircraft; by then it was dark and Hess had dropped to an extremely low altitude, so low that the volunteer on duty at the Royal Observer Corps (ROC) station at Chatton was able to correctly identify it as a Bf 110, and reported its altitude as 50 feet (15 m). Tracked by additional ROC posts, Hess continued his flight into Scotland at high speed and low altitude, but was unable to spot his destination, Dungavel House, so he headed for the west coast to orient himself and then turned back inland. At 22:35 a Boulton Paul Defiant sent from No. 141 Squadron RAF based at Ayr began pursuit. Hess was nearly out of fuel, so he climbed to 6,000 feet (1,800 m) and parachuted out of the plane at 23:06. He injured his foot, either while exiting the aircraft or when he hit the ground. The aircraft crashed at 23:09, about 12 miles (19 km) west of Dungavel House. He would have been closer to his destination had he not had trouble exiting the aircraft. Hess considered this achievement to be the proudest moment of his life.
...
Hess landed at Floors Farm, Eaglesham, south of Glasgow, where he was discovered still struggling with his parachute by local ploughman David McLean. Identifying himself as "Hauptmann Alfred Horn", Hess said he had an important message for the Duke of Hamilton. McLean helped Hess to his nearby cottage and contacted the local Home Guard unit, who escorted the captive to their headquarters in Busby, East Renfrewshire. He was next taken to the police station at Giffnock, arriving after midnight; he was searched and his possessions confiscated. Hess repeatedly requested to meet with the Duke of Hamilton during questioning undertaken with the aid of an interpreter by Major Graham Donald, the area commandant of Royal Observer Corps. After the interview Hess was taken under guard to Maryhill Barracks in Glasgow, where his injuries were treated. By this time some of his captors suspected Hess's true identity, though he continued to insist his name was Horn.
...
Before his departure from Germany, Hess had given his adjutant, Karlheinz Pintsch, a letter addressed to Hitler that detailed his intentions to open peace negotiations with the British. He planned to initially do so with the Duke of Hamilton, at his home, Dungavel House, believing (falsely) that the duke was willing to negotiate peace with the Nazis on terms that would be acceptable to Hitler. Pintsch delivered the letter to Hitler at the Berghof around noon on 11 May. After reading the letter, Hitler let loose an outcry heard throughout the entire Berghof and sent for a number of his inner circle, concerned that a putsch might be underway.
Hitler worried that his allies, Italy and Japan, would perceive Hess's act as an attempt by Hitler to secretly open peace negotiations with the British. Hitler contacted Mussolini specifically to reassure him otherwise. For this reason, Hitler ordered that the German press should characterise Hess as a madman who made the decision to fly to Scotland entirely on his own, without Hitler's knowledge or authority. Subsequent German newspaper reports described Hess as "deluded, deranged", indicating that his mental health had been affected by injuries sustained during World War I. Some members of the government, including Göring and Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, believed this only made matters worse, because if Hess truly were mentally ill, he should not have been holding an important government position.
Hitler stripped Hess of all of his party and state offices, and secretly ordered him shot on sight if he ever returned to Germany. He abolished the post of Deputy Führer, assigning Hess's former duties to Bormann, with the title of Head of the Party Chancellery. Bormann used the opportunity afforded by Hess's departure to secure significant power for himself. Meanwhile, Hitler initiated Aktion Hess, a flurry of hundreds of arrests of astrologers, faith healers and occultists that took place around 9 June. The campaign was part of a propaganda effort by Goebbels and others to denigrate Hess and to make scapegoats of occult practitioners.
American journalist Hubert Renfro Knickerbocker, who had met both Hitler and Hess, speculated that Hitler had sent Hess to deliver a message informing Winston Churchill of the forthcoming invasion of the Soviet Union, and offering a negotiated peace or even an anti-Bolshevik partnership. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin believed that Hess's flight had been engineered by the British. Stalin persisted in this belief as late as 1944, when he mentioned the matter to Churchill, who insisted that they had no advance knowledge of the flight. While some sources reported that Hess had been on an official mission, Churchill later stated in his book The Grand Alliance that in his view, the mission had not been authorized. "He came to us of his own free will, and, though without authority, had something of the quality of an envoy", said Churchill, and referred to Hess's plan as one of "lunatic benevolence".
After the war, Albert Speer discussed the rationale for the flight with Hess, who told him that "the idea had been inspired in him in a dream by supernatural forces. We will guarantee England her empire; in return she will give us a free hand in Europe." While in Spandau prison, Hess told journalist Desmond Zwar that Germany could not win a war on two fronts. "I knew that there was only one way out – and that was certainly not to fight against England. Even though I did not get permission from the Führer to fly I knew that what I had to say would have had his approval. Hitler had great respect for the English people ..." Hess wrote that his flight to Scotland was intended to initiate "the fastest way to win the war".
Alfred Dreyfus (9 October 1859 – 12 July 1935) was a French artillery officer of Jewish ancestry whose trial and conviction in 1894 on charges of treason became one of the most controversial and polarizing political dramas in modern French history. The incident has gone down in history as the Dreyfus Affair, the reverberations from which were felt throughout Europe. It ultimately ended with Dreyfus's complete exoneration.
In 1894, the French Army's counter-intelligence section, led by Lieutenant Colonel Jean Sandherr, became aware that information regarding new artillery parts was being passed to the Germans by a highly placed spy, most likely on the General Staff. Suspicion quickly fell upon Dreyfus, who was arrested for treason on 15 October 1894.
On December 22nd 1894 Alfred Dreyfus, a French-Jewish artillery officer was found guilty of treason in one of history's largest miscarriages of justice. The origin of the scandal lay in a ripped-up letter in wastepaper basket at the German Embassy in Paris. Having been handed by the cleaner who found it to French counter-espionage, it was found to contain French military secrets and was determined to have been leaked by someone within the General Staff.
Alfred Dreyfus, who had been born into a Jewish family in the Alsace region before its annexation by Germany, had been promoted to the rank of captain by 1889. He joined the General Staff in 1893 but, following the discovery of the letter known as the bordereau, was arrested after his handwriting was compared to that in the letter.
Dreyfus’ trial began on 19 December, but was preceded by weeks of anti-Semitic articles in the right-wing wrong-wing press. The trial itself was conducted in a closed court, where the seven judges unanimously found him guilty of treason after being handed a secret dossier during their deliberations. They declared their verdict on 22 December, and sentenced him to life imprisonment preceded by military degradation. This involved the insignia being torn from his uniform and his sword broken, before being paraded in front of a crowd stirred up by the press shouting, “Death to Judas, death to the Jew.”
Dreyfus was transported to Devil's Island in French Guiana, but in France new evidence began to emerge that another officer was the real traitor. With support from the Dreyfusards including the novelist Emile Zola, a retrial in 1899 reduced the sentence while the President of the Republic granted a pardon. However, it wasn’t until 1906 that Dreyfus was finally exonerated and readmitted to the army.
Called to action by tRUMP, thousands of his supporters gathered in Washington, D.C., on January 5 and 6 in support of his [demonstrably false] claim that the 2020 election had been "stolen" from him, and to demand that Vice President Mike Pence and Congress reject Biden's victory. On the morning of January 6, at a "Save America" rally on the Ellipse, tRUMP repeated false claims of election irregularities and urged the crowd to "fight like hell" 01:11:44 At the president's encouragement, thousands of the protesters then walked to the Capitol, where a joint session of Congress was beginning the Electoral College vote count to formalize Biden's victory.
Many of the crowd at the Capitol, some of whom had gathered earlier, breached police perimeters and stormed the building. These rioters occupied, vandalized, and looted parts of the building for several hours. Many became violent, assaulting Capitol Police officers and reporters, erecting a gallows on the Capitol grounds, and attempting to locate lawmakers to take hostage and harm. They chanted "Hang Mike Pence", blaming him for not rejecting the Electoral College votes, [even though] he lacked the constitutional authority to do so. The rioters targetedHouse SpeakerNancy Pelosi (D–CA), vandalizing and looting her offices, as well as those of other members of Congress.
Upon security being breached, Capitol Police evacuated the Senate and House of Representatives chambers. Several buildings in the Capitol complex were evacuated, and all were locked down. Rioters occupied and ransacked the empty Senate chamber while federal law enforcement officers drew handguns to defend the evacuated House floor. Improvised explosive devices were found near the Capitol grounds, as well as at offices of the Democratic National Committee, the Republican National Committee, and in a nearby vehicle. Five people died from the events, while dozens more were injured.
tRUMP initially resisted sending the D.C. National Guard to quell the mob. In a Twitter video, he called the rioters "very special" and told them to "go home in peace" while repeating his false election claims. The Capitol was cleared of rioters by mid-evening, and the counting of the electoral votes resumed and was completed in the early morning hours. Pence declared President-elect Biden and Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris victors and affirmed that they would assume office on January 20. Pressured by his administration, the threat of removal, and numerous resignations, tRUMP later committed to an orderly transition of power in a televised statement.
The events were widely condemned by political leaders and organizations in the United States and internationally. Mitch McConnell (R–KY), Senate Minority Leader, called the storming of the Capitol a "failed insurrection" provoked by the UNpresident's "lies" and said that the Senate "will not bow to lawlessness or intimidation". Several social media and technology companies suspended or banned tRUMP's accounts from their platforms, and many business organizations cut ties with him. A week after the riot, the House of Representatives voted to impeach tRUMP for "incitement of insurrection", making him the only U.S. UNpresident to have been impeached twice.
Opinion polls showed that a large majority of Americans disapproved of the storming of the Capitol and of tRUMP's actions leading up to and following it, although some RepuGNicans [as distinct from Republicans] supported the attack or at least did not blame tRUMP for it. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has opened more than 170 investigations into the events, and indicated that many more are likely to come. Dozens of people present at the riot were later found to be listed in the FBI's Terrorist Screening Database, most as suspected white "supremacists". Members of the Oath Keepers anti-government paramilitary group were indicted on conspiracy charges for allegedly staging a planned mission in the Capitol.
