[ 29 March 1938 ] Speaking in the House of Lords on 29 March 1938, Archbishop of Canterbury Cosmo Gordon Lang, not wishing to appear too pro-Nazi, began his defence of Hitler’s recent seizure of Austria, cautiously. He reasoned that it had been ‘inevitable,’ and that Prime Minister Chamberlain, by not taking retaliatory action, had…
[ 13 March 1938 ] Late in the evening of Sunday 13 March 1938, Hitler gave an interview in a hotel room in the Austrian town of Linz to a journalist in whom he had complete confidence to dutifully report the Nazi propaganda line as to why a day earlier his troops had marched into…
[ 10 March 1938 ] On Thursday 10 March 1938, the newly appointed German Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, was on the second day of a four day diplomatic visit to London. Earlier in the day, he lunched with the foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, at the Foreign Office, having being forced to run a gauntlet…
26 October 1938 On 26 October 1938, journalists were driven out to the Palestinian village of Mi’ar, east of Acre, to witness ‘a punitive measure.’ Arthur Merton, the correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, described it as a village ‘with a population of about 500… perched on a hill, looking most innocent with its clean white houses,’…
20 October 1938 Captain Orde windgate is still lauded as a hero who led daring raiding operations behind the Japanese lines in Burma during the Second World War. As tourists gaze up at his memorial, which stands just a two minute walk from Big Ben, few will be aware of the ugly reputation he earned…
3 October 1938 On 3 October 1938, Special Night Squad (SNS) soldiers, composed of British troops alongside Jewish auxiliary forces, commanded by Captain Orde Wingate, launched a surprise punitive attack on the villagers of Daburiyya in northern Palestine. The raid followed an Arab terror assault the previous evening on the town of Tiberias, killing 19…
30 September 1938 Today in 1938, the swastika flag was raised over Cardiff’s Town Hall, where it fluttered alongside the flags of Britain, France and Fascist Italy. The instructions came directly from Tory mayor Oliver Purnell and within hours he had received a message from the German consul ‘expressing delight at the Lord Mayor’s gesture…
7 September 1938 Shortly before the dawn on the morning of 7 September 1938, a company of the Royal Ulster Rifles (RUR), backed by several Rolls Royce armoured cars belonging to the 11th Hussars, surrounded the Palestinian village of al-Bassa, a large settlement of about two thousand Christian and Muslim Arabs located near the Lebanese…
20 August 1938 On 20 August 1938, Dr. E. D. Forster, a physician working with the Church of Scotland, wrote in his journal of his shock at the ferocious wholesale violence inflicted on the Arab inhabitants in the Palestinian town of Hebron. British soldiers and police officers were resorting to terror tactics to crush an…
14 May 1938 It was a most shameful moment of English sporting deference to the Nazi regime. On 14 May 1938, the England football team gave the Nazi salute in front of a crowd of over one hundred thousand in the German Olympic Stadium. The most shocking aspect, however, was not the incident itself, but…
