One must wonder why historians still have no access to the full records of the Nazi era. But yes, for those who are not aware of it, the Nazi archives are as well protected as the inquisition records at the Vatican. Lawrence Rees is using the KGB and Russian archives, I wish he could use the Nazi ones at will, the US ones at will and the archives of the Jewish World Organization as well.
(By the way the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) now admits that, in breach of the spirit of the Public Records Act of 1958, it has been sitting on 1.2 million files that should long ago have been transferred to the National Archives. The files, kept secret at the Lord Chancellor's discretion go back to the 1856 Treaty of Paris (?). The implication of this subterfuge are huge, wrote The Guardian recently: it destroys any trust we still had that documents sent to the archives represent a full and accurate records of Britain's foreign affairs).
The picture is not a pretty one. Churchill looks like a fool and he comes out of the book as a pathetic liar and a short-sighted politician. Maybe too much whisky to combat the enormous stress of a giant poker game. Franklin Roosevelt is everything except a democrat. He is also a pathetic liar. Maybe too much opium, because he was sick, because he was arrogant but also because he was American. His target was not the liberation of the world, the end of the Nazi regime - at some point it is clear that he might have been to bed with Hitler rather than Stalin.
His target was the end of the British Empire. Churchill missed the point entirely. As for Stalin, the evil communist, he had every reason to despise Churchill, Roosevelt or Hitler. They all wanted him dead from the very start. To stall the inevitable attack, he goes to bed with Hitler - to buy time, to prepare for the cataclysm and the fact that both Churchill and Roosevelt would be too happy to see German troops in Moscow.
Both Churchill and Roosevelt use all tactics to stall any serious help to the embattled Soviet Army. The price in life is enormous, but who care, they are all communists. Yet the betrayed russians endure and the poker game ends with an unexpected outcome: Stalin survives the on slow, the Red Army does what no one did on the ground - resists and then goes on the move. The result is panic, and Yalta. Roosevelt wants to deal with Stalin without Churchill. Stalin knows he is the winner. He fixes the rules of the outcome of the war. Churchill abandons his Polish friends as well as the white Russians. the British smell something is not right and he is booted out of government. the dying Roosevelt get the bits and pieces he wanted from the British Empire while the US army keeps bombing civilians in Germany and Italian churches and monasteries. What he really wants is to be the master of the universe and Europe should be obliterated. How De Gaulle, a virtual prisoner in London survives all the lies and the loss of North Africa (betrayed by Churchill) without becoming an alcoholic is a mystery, but Free France was really pain. Churchill wanted France dead as much as Roosevelt wanted the British Empire dead, so de Gaulle surveyed playing one against the other. (The aftermath was that once the British Empire was gone, the Americans went after French Indochina!)
Rudolf Hess, the nº2 of the Nazi government in 1941, was confined to Spandau until 1987. He was not allowed to write a memo to his children. Hew was not allowed to write his memoirs (yet we have Speer's ones and they must be read). We were told he was a mad man when he flew over to Scotland in 1941, but after reading this book I think he was the fall guy. Clearly everyone was obsessed by Stalin and Hitler had good reason to believe that Churchill would line up under pressure with whoever was anti-Staline. With the help of a bottle of scotch, of course. So Rudolf Hess was the go-between, but what he got was a one way ticket when a spy passed the information to Staline. Hess was not allowed to go free and to speak to historians, even in the 1980s. So much for our democracy and freedom of speech.
This book must be read - as well as Speer's memoir (Speer was the minister of industry that kept the German army supplied until 1944, in spite of a near total embargo from outside.
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