Forbidden History - Hitler's British Headquarters

Episode Date: January 7, 2025

In this episode of the Forbidden History podcast, we join author and historian Guy Walters as he explores one of the greatest historical ‘what ifs?’ of all time - what if Nazi Germany had won WW2? And more specifically, what were Hitler’s post-war plans for Britain? Cast List: Guy Walters: A British author, historian, and journalist who has written several books on WWII. As a journalist for The Times, he writes on historical topics for the national press.  Trevor Davenport: Alderney Historian  Nicholas O’Shaughnessy: Professor of Communication at Queen Mary, University of London Myriam Wilks-Heeg: Department of History, Liverpool University Terry Charman: Historian & Author  Frank McDonough: Author & Historian of the Third Reich Lisa Pine: Associate Professor of History Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains mature adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. In May 1945, the Allies accepted the surrender of Nazi Germany and the war was finally over. The Nazis had been beaten and people all over Britain took to the streets to celebrate. But it's only fairly recently that we've discovered just how advanced Hitler's plans were for the world. had the Nazis actually won the war.

These were not just pipe dreams. These were detailed plans and preparations, and many of them had already been implemented. In fact, Hitler's twisted vision was well on its way to becoming a terrifying reality. So what exactly were Hitler's plans for a new world order? How would the Third Reich have been rolled out across the globe? And what would the world today have looked like

if the Nazis had actually won the war. In pre-war Britain, Liverpool was a hugely important city. Its port served as a gateway to the Atlantic, providing the country with vital supplies, such as food, fuel and raw materials. But it was also the scene of Nazi pre-war spying. Liverpool was the second major port in Britain. It was known as the second city of the empire.

It was very crucial to the trade between Britain and America, but it was also, of course, central to the Navy as well. For both those reasons, Liverpool was always going to be targeted by the Nazis. And if we look at the Nazi plans for invading Britain, you'll see that Liverpool comes out very high on their list of targets. Well, I mean, Liverpool was a vital place for the Germans. The Germans were really interested in Liverpool. It was the gateway for supplies.

It was also a naval headquarters, and it was a place for shipbuilding, obviously. So lots of submarines were built in Birkenhead, and those were obviously also then the areas, which were targeted by their Germans in the Second World War. They had a huge espionage effort, both before and especially during the war. They had their embassy, they had their embassy staff, if they had Germans working in Britain, every German was potentially a spy, and very often was. So the exchange program existed for a number of years, and so quite a few Germans came to study in Liverpool throughout the 1930s. And then in 1938, when one student was caught actually rifling through the desk of a professor.

And he was looking for information on German refugees, and he was caught. And after that, the exchange program was termed. The information and intelligence gathered by Nazi pre-war spying in Liverpool would go on to be used against the city with devastating effect by the German Luftwaffe. Like a number of other ports and industrial centres, I mean Liverpool obviously was, you know, for interest to the Germans and of course did suffer from the Blitz when that began in September 1940 and even before then. and the bombing in May, spring of 1941 was very heavy. The blitz course was intended to knock Britain out of the war and to attack places like Liverpool in port and ports. It wasn't just the universities that the Nazis were seeking to infiltrate

as they planned their invasion of Great Britain. If you had been around in the late 1930s, and specifically in 1937, you would have seen lots of young German men cycling around Britain. These were members of the Hitler youth, And they weren't on just some innocent touristical adventure. No, what they were doing was gathering as much intelligence as they could on the British Isles. They weren't cycling.

They were spikling. The Hitler youth was really like a training ground for future soldiers really. And also a kind of training ground in Nazi ideology. So they went on sort of hiking trips, camping trips. Some of the camping trips came to Britain as well. There was a kind of idea that they may have been engaged in spying for Britain some of the older members of the Hitler youth. Recently declassified files showed that there was a real concern about these cycling tours. They showed that MI5 had requested surveillance of these groups.

It was discovered that a German cycling magazine had published an article which was thought to contain a message to all Nazi groups cycling in foreign countries. Impress on your memory the roads and paths, villages and towns, prominent church towers, and other landmarks, so that you will not forget them. Make a note of the names and places, rivers, seas, and mountains. Perhaps you should be able to utilize these sometime for the benefit of the fatherland. But the Nazi pre-war spying activities would soon be over. As tensions continued to rise across Europe, peace seemed more and more unlikely. In September 1939, after the invasion of Poland, Britain and France declared war on Germany. However, by the following summer of 1940, the Germans are not only overrun the low countries

of Holland and Belgium, but they had then stunned the world by forcing the French to their knees in just 46 days. That defeat was almost as humiliating for the British, as the invasion of France necessitated the famous evacuation of hundreds of thousands of three years. thousands of troops from Dunkirk. Churchill had called the evacuation of Dunkirk a miracle and a deliverance. But it had also left his military in a weakened state, and it would be several months before Britain was once again combat ready.

Most of the British Army's heavy equipment, guns, even rifles, had been left behind at Dunkirk. All our defenses were in very, very poor shape. We hadn't anticipated an invasion of this country. We'd seen the way that Holland had gone in five days and Belgium was collapsing under the weight of a German invasion. So Anthony Eden, Churchill's Secretary of State for War, calls into being the local defence volunteers, which Churchill insisted be changed to the Home Guard, now better known perhaps as Dad's Army. The German army, with all its might, was at the gate.

It had crushed all before it in just a few days, and Britain was next on the list. Invasion seemed inevitable, and so the country began making preparations to meet it. I believe there was in lots of areas of Britain at the time a real fear that the Germans were going to invade. I think the invasion fear was real. It seems as though Britain is on the edge of invasion. They did have one weapon which was truly frightening, and that's the six-engineer gigantic. At that time in 1940 just gliders, but later, later with six engines. They could carry about 200 men.

That would have been a tough thing to deal with. And of course they had perfected paratroop assault, the first people ready to do that as they did on Crete. Everyone was holding their breath, they're expecting paratroops. They were expecting the worst, and it was a universal belief, actually. There was going to be an invasion, definitely. They were right to be fearful, because the threat, That felt very real.

Hitler had put into motion Operation Sea Lion, the long planned invasion of Britain. The Operation Sea Line was the plan to invade Britain, part fantasy, part propaganda, part reality. They did of course have equipment lined up. They had pontoons, landing craft, all of those things. That really started after the fall of France, the German Navy, Air Force and the German army, and Rhine barges were assembled to carry over the troops and exercises were conducted as well. The island of Alderney is one of the smaller Channel Islands

and the closest to mainland Britain. Today it's a beautiful and peaceful island. But during the Second World War, Alderney was a very different place. To find out more about what happened here, we spoke to historian and Alderney resident, Dr. Trevor Davenpool. Why were the Channel Islands invaded and why did it even bother to do so? Well, of course, after he'd conquered France, he saw the Channel Islands as a potential, well, military area really, to help defend the Channel from his point of view. But the other reason is, of course, he really wanted to capture British soil,

because it would have been a nice feather in his cap. The Nazis would have put into place very, very similar policies to those that they had in place. So there was always an ideal community that Hitler was trying to achieve. He had his methods and aims and ways of achieving that. And I think given the opportunity, he would have applied those anywhere. Well, it was an enormous shot because it looked like Britain. You had the familiar images of policemen and little red telephone kiosks, suddenly surrounded by stormtrooper types.

Of course, the Germans played it for all their worth. they're worth. As one looks at the newsreel film at the time at the British Bobby talking to a German Luftwaffe officer, the band's marching past, Lloyd's Bank, that type of thing. He built a massive amount of bunkers for such a tiny island. And he ended up building five artillery batteries, 13 strong points, 12 resistance nests, three defence line and 32,000 mines on this island, and 23 anti-aircraft batteries. Who built all these fortifications?

So most of them, the big bunkers were built by the forced labourers, and the breakwater was repaired by them, tunnels were drilled by them, but I would say probably 90% of the workover was done by the forced labourers. And that must have come at a huge human cost. It did. It came at a great human cost. I mean, 400 died here, and when you consider 400,000, that's 10%.

The Nazis fully believed that Britain would try and regain control of their territories. And they set about heavily fortifying the islands, which could have been used as staging posts for any future invasion of Britain. Even today, Alderney is littered with bunkers, turrets, and observation posts, most of which were constructed by forced labor. On Alderney, there were four camps alone dedicated to holding these prisoners. The most notorious of these was Lager Silt. It's extraordinary to think that here on Aldenny, the Germans operated four camps, three work camps and one SS concentration camp.

It's thought that the total inmate population numbered about 6,000, although that number fluctuated. What is certain is that between January 1942, when some of the camps here began operating, and 1944 when they were closed, more than 700 people were killed. That figure could be a lot higher, but we'll not. never know for sure. Camp Silt was commanded by a man called Maximilian List, who is your typical nasty piece of SS work. Aldi was a plumb posting for him. He had his own villa built right on the outskirts of the camp and they had a lovely view of the channel and behind it he even had built his own tunnel. Life at Lager Silt was brutal and inhumane. There were reports from witnesses

stating that many of the prisoners were clothed in tattered striped uniforms, that many of them forced to work in bare feet. It seemed as if the cruelty of the guards knew no bounds. Their rations were pitiful. They had half a liter of soup in the morning, half a liter of soup in the evening, and they had to do a full day's work on the quarries and building concrete fortifications.

And of course, if they didn't do their work, they were executed. It's possible to imagine all sorts of horrible things that happened here. It is off the site of an SS concentration camp. And we know of one specific incident that took place. A young, 18-year-old Russian prisoner decided to run away. He wanted to go back home, which is, of course, impossible. And when he was caught by the SS, he was strung up, crucified between two gateposts

and left to die overnight on a cold December night. But what makes this story even worse is that the SS Commandant decided to drench him, in freezing cold water. So of course he then froze to death. There are even accounts that claim that once the prisoners were no longer fit for purpose by being able to work, they were simply taken to Aldernie's half a mile long breakwater and thrown into the sea to be swept away by the tides. Well, I think that a number of historians have debated really whether an occupation by the Germans of the British Isles would have resembled

that of the German occupation of the Channel Islands. Islands. Undoubtedly, I think there would have been concentration camps and some of the plans for occupation of Britain were really quite ruthless. Back on the home front during the first few months of the war, few would have had any idea of the horrors of the concentration camps. Instead, they would have been trying to adjust to the realities of living in wartime Britain. And very few, if any, had any inkling of what would have lain in store for Britain had Hitler's successfully crossed the channel. In the event of a full-scale invasion,

key members of the British establishment would most likely have fled the country, including the royal family. The royal family would have gone to Canada, and so would the government, and the war would have continued. From there, it would not have been the end of the war, but Britain would have been under German occupation

and a quizzing government would have been found. While what was left of the British, British government may have continued to operate and fight the occupation in exile, Hitler would have installed his own government in Britain. But surprisingly, it wouldn't have been made up of Nazis, but Britons themselves. Whether a sort of a Vichy-style regime would have been established in Britain with the Germans occupying key spots but allowing a British government probably under Lloyd George, Sir Samuel The Duke and Duchess of Windsor back on the throne, as a lot of people have speculated,

whether that would have been what the German occupation would have been like. After France had fallen to Nazi Germany in 1940, the country in the south was governed by a regime known as Vichy France. The Nazis had allowed the Vichy government to exist on the condition that they align their interests with those of Nazi Germany. Could the same style of regime have lain in store for for a conquered Britain. Hitler wanted to preserve British democracy.

He said the British just can't become fascists. It's just not in their culture. So we'll have the parties continue. They'd have a series of regional governments, you know, one of them based in the southeast, the biggest one, Birmingham was cited. Manchester, Yorkshire, and they had the Scottish centre of government as well,

and Northern Ireland. So they were gonna sort of run it like they did in Germany itself, They have a federal system in Germany. They were going to do it like that, have what were called gauze in Britain with various kind of pro-Nazi governors who rule these areas in conjunction with the Nazis. We were considered, of course,

and Aryans like and Germanic cousins, and that might have been in our favor or might not. Another real concern was the fate of the country's publicly owned art collections, especially the priceless masterpieces that hung in the National Gallery in London. Having seen how the Nazis had bombed museums and looted from the countries they had occupied, Britain established a plan to have the nation's treasures moved to various secret locations. Abandoned mines and quarries were used to store countless paintings

by some of the world's greatest artists in an attempt to keep them safe and out of the hands of the occupying forces. Hitler would have paid a visit to London, there's no doubt, with people like Arno Brecker, who is his court sculptor. There's the famous picture of Hitler in front of the Eiffel Tower, but on his right, the man in the leather who looks like a Gestapo agent is in fact a famous sculptor. I really do feel that maybe the Elgin Marbles might have traveled across the North Sea and ended up in Berlin. Not only would Britain's art have been under threat, but also many of their iconic buildings.

Hitler, of course, was madly passionate about architecture. Architecture was his baby, his fetish. He would have taken a certain interest in some of the grandest and most monumental buildings. Blenheim Palace, one of England's largest houses, was earmarked as the headquarters of the Nazi occupation. Homes in the New Forest in the south of England would have housed high-ranking Nazi officials, with private school Eaton, among others, used for the education of their children. The seaside town of Blackpool was even suggested as a rest and recreation center for troops. But what about Hitler himself?

Where would he have called home on his visits to newly occupied Britain? Bridge North in Tropshire, it's a lovely, sleepy town with a lovely, sleepy town with a really rich history. It's got a ruined castle and a museum that tells of its really rather dramatic part in the English Civil War. And I'm sure that most of its 12,000 odd residents would confirm it's a really agreeable place to live. Well, by all accounts, Adolf Hitler thought so as well, because this is where he's supposed to have planned to set up his home during his visits to newly conquered Britain. It may not seem like an obvious place for Hitler to base himself. But Bridge North is located right in the middle of England and had excellent

transport links by rail and even a nearby airfield. It was also rumored that Hitler would have used Apley Hall as his personal residence. In many respects, Britain would have been no different to any of the other countries that were occupied. Just as they had done elsewhere, the Nazis would have implemented their doctrine with immediate effect. This now brings us on to the Black Book. This is a highly sinister document and it contains the names of all those the Nazis considered dangerous and subversive. There are exactly 2,820 names on this list and all of them were earmarked for immediate arrest. Historian Terry Charman was a curator at the Imperial War Museum in London. Well, it contains nearly 3,000 names of personalities that were going to be taken

into protective custody by the Nazis had the invasion of Britain Operation C-Line prove successful. But it also, of course, includes a lot of British personalities like Churchill, Antonide and Duff Cooper, the most prominent three anti-appeasers, plus Neville Chamberlain, the appease himself, plus some very strange personalities to find in an arrest list like this. Winston Spencer, Minister President, and he was found at Westram Kent, Chartwell. Manor. Noel Coward, why is he on the list? Well, Noll Coward, I think, is on the list because during the period of the Phony War, the first nine months of the war, Coward was working with the French, liaison with the French

on propaganda exercise in Paris. And I think that obviously this was picked up on, that he was all swaggering down the Rue de Rivoli, wearing a naval uniform. That was one claim. The writer Nancy Cunard, whose mother, Lady Cunard, actually was one of Von Ruevo. Ribbentrop's favourite hostesses when he was ambassador in London, ironically. Although we have some quite famous names, we've also got some quite obscure ones, men just described as businessman in Riga. Who are these people? Well, in November 1939, there was the famous or infamous incident at Venlo, where the Nazis kidnapped two British secret agents quite high up.

It is assumed that in their interrogations, some of these names slipped out. And these are names of people that were in the British Secret Service, MI6. MI6, so actually there are some very, very important names to the Nazis here. They're not just politicians or sort of leading figures in society. They're actually intelligence officers as well. Yes, their subsequent fate was measured by what happened to their sort of people similar to them in occupied Poland because there was a listing that the Nazis had made of Polish personalities that were marked for, well, death, basically. So all 3,000 or so people in this book would have ended up in concentration camps.

And then you think almost certainly would have been killed? Yes, yes. It's very easy to surmise from what we know about the history of Nazi Germany and Hitler's aims and plans and policies that he would have rounded up and deported the Jews and others that he didn't like the look of, that he would have also exterminated the essential. island population, so he murdered the mentally and physically handicapped in Germany.

There's no reason why he wouldn't have done the same in any of the places that he took over. You could imagine that that be the knock in the night, Gestapo vans, screaming around London, rounding up these people, sending them to a concentration camp. The village of Coles Hill was once home to the headquarters of the Second World War military group called the auxiliary units, also known as the AUU. In the summer of 1940, Winston Churchill worried about the threat of invasion, called for the formation of a unit of guerrilla fighters who would wage a secret war against the occupying forces. They were a kind of almost kamikaze units to make life health the invader by shooting their senior officers, by blowing things up, by sabotage through plastic explosive, make life utterly horrible. The AU worked in cells consisting of four to eight men who were often farmers, gamekeepers,

or even poachers selected for their unpaid, parallel knowledge of the area. To keep them hidden, the Royal Engineers constructed specially equipped hideouts from which they could launch their attacks. These were known as operational bases. Tom Sykes was part of the Coles Hill Auxiliary Research Team, and his father was an actual serving member of the AU. The operational bases were always in secluded areas, areas where the public didn't normally go. And they weren't normally on a footpath. They were somewhere hidden in the woods.

And each operational base may have had an observation post where they had one man looking out to see if there were any German blue. patrols and the light. The observation post was selected for its clear views of the surrounding area, allowing the AU to conduct a reconnaissance on the Nazis and to keep the enemy in view as they approached. Some of these would have been sighted near roads, also close to their bases, but near a road and they can make notes of convoy movement. Got it, okay, so they're spying.

Yes. Yeah. They would then be able to report their findings back to the near- operational base. Each patrol was expected to be self-contained and self-sufficient. They were equipped with pistols, knives, machine guns, and plastic explosives, and enough food and water to last two weeks, because that was probably all they would ever need.

They're actually told you'll only have a life of 12 days, and then if they capture you, are going to capture you, shoot yourself. High on their list of targets were aircraft, railways, fuel depots, and high-ranking Nazis. Churchill said, you know, you can always take one with you. That was his philosophy, meaning you can always take a German soldier, you know, kill him as if he, even if he, you know, his companions kill you. By 1944, there were over 500 of these bases across Britain.

But the turning tide of the war meant that they never actually became operational. Many of them actually then are later on in the war, because the auxiliary units were stood down in 44, many of them then joined the invasion of Europe as regular soldiers. By 1944, the Nazis were on the back foot, and Germany was completely defeated. Scenes of celebration broke out across the world. Those lucky enough had survived the war, and their way of life had been preserved from the threat of the war. from the threat of Nazi extremism. But other countries weren't so lucky.

In the places he did conquer, Hitler was able to put his plans into motion and started to build an extremely dark new world.