Personalities

Military leaders of all belligerent nations, including non-military personalities of all nations, excluding Germany, whose non-military personalities are covered under the entry “Third Reich Era.”

Admiral Wilhelm Canaris headed Adolf Hitler’s military intelligence service for nine years. He is one of the most enigmatic figures of the Third Reich. Robert Kempner, the U.S. deputy prosecutor at Nuremberg, said that Canaris had a Jekyll and Hyde split personality. Kempner wrote that Canaris was “the man who organized the National Socialist fifth column, who… introduced the murderous weapons of sabotage and surreptitious infiltration and sent German soldiers on suicide missions and who, on the other hand, permitted individual officers to conspire against the regime.” This article discusses the career of Adm. Canaris, and also attempts to uncover the motives of this extremely controversial German.

Editor's Note: This article is excerpted from David L. Hoggan's book The Forced War: The Origins and Originators of World War II. The complete book will be published in hardcover by the Institute for Historical Review in December 1983. Professor Hoggan's treatment of the Roosevelt/American role in his book is …

Q: General Remer, what was your role in the Second World War? A:… I was a front-line commander, and I led combat units throughout the war years. The only exceptions were a three-month period in Berlin as commander of the Berlin guard regiment and another three months as commander of …

Sir Oswald Ernald Mosley “Bomber” Harris died on 5 April of this year, at the age of 91. As Air Officer Commanding in Chief Bomber Command from February 1942 until the end of the Second World War, he was in charge of Britain’s massive “area bombing” campaign directed against German …

Remer at the Eighth IHR Conference, 1987 German courts have ordered an 82-year-old man in poor health to serve a 22-month prison sentence because he published articles rejecting claims of wartime mass killings in Auschwitz gas chambers. In November 1993, the Federal High Court in Karlsruhe upheld the 1992 sentence …

Leon Degrelle, combat hero of the Second World War, political leader, author and friend of the Institute for Historical Review, died March 31 [1994] in the southern Spanish city of Malaga. He was 87. Degrelle was born on June 15, 1906, into a prosperous Catholic family in Bouillon, Belgium. As …

Otto Ernst Remer in a 1944 portrait. Otto Ernst Remer – a wartime German army officer who played a key role in putting down the July 1944 plot against Hitler, and an important postwar revisionist publicist – died on October 4, 1997, at the age of 85. Since 1994 he …

Knut Hamsun[1],[2] ranks as one of the most influential and innovative European authors of all time. On December 10, 1920 his literary career was crowned with the award of the Nobel Prize for literature by the Swedish Academy for his monumental work, Growth of the Soil. His …

In a secret wartime memorandum recently made public, Winston Churchill told his advisers that he wanted to "drench" Germany with poison gas. Churchill's July 1944 memo to his chief of staff Gen. Hastings Ismay was reproduced in the August-September 1985 issue of American Heritage magazine. "I you to think very …

During the Second World War, Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski was an SS Obergruppenführer, Higher SS and Police Chief for the center section of the Eastern front, and Chief of the Anti-Partisan Units. He testified for the prosecution at the postwar Nuremberg Tribunal as part of a deal struck with the …

No informed person could well deny that Winston S. Churchill was probably the most spectacular showman in the history of British politics, and he was surely one of Britain's greatmasters of patriotic and honorific rhetoric. But when we go beyond this into any phase of Churchill's career we enter debatable …

"A Slaughterhouse for Sacred Cows" A new revisionist biography of Winston Churchill, which contends that Britain would be better off today if the wartime prime minister had made peace with Hitler, has touched off a furious debate about the legacy of Britain’s most revered 20th-century personality and other fundamental questions …

World-class historian David Irving is no stranger to readers of the JHR. His address to the 1983 Intemational Revisionist Conference, which appeared in the Winter 1984 Journal of Historical Review ("On Contemporary History and Historiography"), was something of a primer on Irving's Revisionist historiographical method. It was spiced as well …

Hitler's Generals edited by Correlli Barnett New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1989, hardbound, 497 pages, index, photographs, $24.95. ISBN: 1-55584-161-9. In Hitler's Generals, an international team of widely-published historians explores the characters and careers of twenty-six leading German military leaders who translated Hitler's directives into the stunning victories of 1939-41 and …

Dönitz: The Last Führer, by Peter Padfield. New York: Harper and Row, 1984, 523pp, $25.00, ISBN 0-06-015264-8. In an appearance on a book-talk show on BBC radio, the author was asked why he had written this book. He replied that it was written at the suggestion of his agent. That …

In the interests of fairness, Jeffrey Herf, whose work is here critiqued, was sent the following essay prior to its publication here, and asked to correct any possibly false or misleading statements. No response from Mr. Herf had been received by press time. Introduction Winston Churchill played an important role …

Trevor J. Constable, born in New Zealand in 1925, has an international reputation as an aviation historian and author. With Colonel Raymond F. Toliver, he has authored a number of successful works on fighter aviation and ace fighter pilots. He has lived in the United States since 1952. He now …

Churchill as Icon When Professor Harry Jaffa proposed that Winston Churchill was not only the Man of the Twentieth Century but The Man of Many Centuries,[1] he found that many agreed with him. I did not. Personally, Man of Many Centuries sounds absurd. Was Winnie greater than Bismarck, than …

Embroiling America in War — Again In September 1939, Britain went to war with Germany, pursuant to the guarantee which Chamberlain had been panicked into extending to Poland in March. Lloyd George had termed the guarantee "hare-brained," while Churchill had supported it. Nonetheless, in his history of the war Churchill …

The upsurge of nostalgia for Joseph Stalin in Russia is a remembrance of the greatness that Russia achieved during that era, and one which many Russians hope to see renewed. A notable seeming paradox is that this revival of Stalinism is related more to Russian messianic Slavophilism, which sees Russia …