Adolf and Eva - NY Times

Adolf and Eva

By DOROTHY GALLAGHER

Published: November 16, 2011


Hitler could not have wished for a better girlfriend. In this first full-scale biography of Eva Braun, the German historian Heike B. Görtemaker examines the known sources for Braun’s life and emerges with a highly readable and consistent portrait of an ordinary woman who loved sports, fashion and jazz; and who was, without a doubt, utterly devoted to the man history has seen as “evil incarnate.”


In “Eva Braun: Life With Hitler,” Görtemaker asks whether it is useful for a nuanced picture of Hitler to show him in his off-hours, a man like other men, putting on his trousers one leg at a time. She thinks that it is, and that the “demonization” of Hitler has been an impediment to a fuller understanding of him and of the Nazi phenomenon. Through Braun, she believes, a new perspective on Hitler will open. And she writes that Braun’s “ ‘normality’ at the center of this atmosphere of ‘evil’ is like an anachronism that brings this evil into relief and shows it in a new light.” One wonders if the quotation marks are strictly necessary.

One day in 1929, in Munich, 40-year-old Adolf Hitler, the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party, paid a visit to the shop of his personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann. It was here that he first met Hoffmann’s new employee, pretty, blond, blue-eyed, 17-year-old Eva Braun. Hitler was quite taken; Eva was naturally impressed with the leader of this up-and-coming national movement.

Eva was a lower-middle-class girl, one of three sisters, of purely Aryan descent (Hitler had her family investigated for Jewish taint). Probably Eva wished for marriage, but this was not to be, at least not for 16 years. Hitler had another bride: “I am married to the German people and their fate! . . . No, I cannot marry, I must not,” he often said in one form or another. A secret girlfriend was another matter.

But what about the sex? It has been theorized that Hitler was heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, impotent. A coprophilia fetish has been mentioned. In fact, no one really knows. Görtemaker believes that Hitler’s sexuality was in the conventional range. There is a 20-page diary fragment attributed to Braun, but Görtemaker, a cautious historian who never claims more for her subject than the evidence will bear, warns us that the diary may not be authentic. Still, she quotes an entry in which Braun mentions “two marvelously beautiful hours with him until midnight.”

In those years of the Nazis’ rise to power, Hitler didn’t have much time for Eva; he had a lot on his mind. There were the Reichs­tag elections to win, the chancellorship to obtain, the masses to whip up, the Jews to persecute. (Just by the way, Hitler’s rise to absolute power was thanks, in part, to the Soviet Comintern policy of pitting German Communists against Social Democrats, thus splitting the vote on the left.)

While Hitler was away from Munich, Eva lived with her parents, worked at Hoffmann’s photo studio and waited for her admirer’s occasional visits. She was not always patient. There is evidence, Görtemaker says, that she tried to kill herself in 1932, and tried again three years later when she feared that Hitler’s interest was flagging. Braun’s first attempt reminded Hitler that his half-niece, Geli Raubal, who had lived with him and to whom he had been devoted in some way, actually did kill herself in 1931. He was moved to remark about Braun, “Now I must look after her” because something like this “mustn’t happen again.” Braun’s second attempt in 1935 spurred Hitler to provide her with her own apartment in Munich, and give her permission to spend more time in his presence.

Did Braun “share the political positions and basic worldview of her lover”? Görtemaker asks. The question is rhetorical. Why wouldn’t she? If only by osmosis, why wouldn’t this young, quite ordinary girl accept the opinions of her lover, of her boss and of her father, who was also a Nazi Party member? What Hitler believed, large numbers of Germans came to believe: that Germany could not live in peace unless the traitorous Jewish Bolshevik bankers were exterminated, and that Germany’s hegemony had to be extended to the west and to the east. As Rudolf Hess’s wife, Ilse, wrote in the early days of the Nazis: “To put it in the clean and plain and negative terms appropriate to the movement, we are anti-Semites. Consistently, rigorously, without exceptions!” In September 1935, Braun, who was generally left in Munich, was allowed to attend the Nazi Party convention in Nuremberg, where she witnessed the passing of the Nuremberg laws depriving Jews of German citizenship and forbidding their participation in civic life.

Görtemaker is often compelled to phrases like “we can only speculate,” “no authenticated information about,” “the final truth, however, remains unknown.” It is true that all personal letters and documents between Braun and Hitler were destroyed on Hitler’s orders in the last days of the war, and that specific information is to be found only in the memoirs and testimony of those who served him — and who, when the war was lost, served themselves. But Görtemaker shows that by early 1936 Braun’s position with Hitler was “unassailable.” At the Berghof, Hitler’s mountain retreat in the cloud-swirled Bavarian Alps, she had her own little apartment, next to Hitler’s bedroom, and was accepted by his intimates as mistress of the house. At meals, she sat at Hitler’s left. She felt secure enough to rebuke Hitler for being late to dinner, and to indicate when she thought he had talked enough. She enjoyed swimming and skiing. She loved fashion and changed her clothes several times a day. She took photographs and home movies of Hitler and his guests (which can be seen on YouTube) and generally behaved as though she were at home.

And then, on Sept. 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland. Görtemaker is in no doubt that Braun knew of his plans. He seems to have talked freely about them at the Berghof. During the course of the conflict, at least until close to the end, she seems to have been unconcerned, taking her annual trip to Italy while Hitler was conducting the war on the Eastern Front. Even as the war turned against Germany, Hitler, according to Goebbels, was praising his companion’s “calm, intelligent and objective way of being.” Not until 1944, when the Red Army had reached Warsaw, did Braun make her will.

Eva Braun loved Hitler; of that there can be no doubt. In the spring of 1945, when the war was clearly lost, she rushed to Berlin to be with him in his bunker, to marry him, to commit suicide with him at the moment when the Red Army reached the Reichstag. But knowing that there was genuine love in Hitler’s life, even a sort of domestic existence, do we see Hitler’s “evil” in a new light, as Görtemaker suggests we will? Or do we know, as we have always known, that evil walks among us; that no monster (or his friends and lovers) thinks himself monstrous, no madman thinks himself mad; and that, as the filmmaker Jean Renoir once said: “The really terrible thing is that everyone has his reasons.”


Dorothy Gallagher’s biography of Lillian Hellman will be published next year.


A version of this review appeared in print on November 20, 2011, on page BR24 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Adolf and Eva.

WWII Book Review - Max Hastings The World At War

World War II, From the Ground Up

By RICHARD J. EVANS

Published: November 17, 2011



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Do we really need another history of World War II? The book market is overflowing with them, and new ones seem to appear at almost weekly intervals. Vast though the conflict was, we probably know more about it than any other war in history. Sir Max Hastings, author of this latest survey, has already written no fewer than eight books about key campaigns and personalities of the war. Has he got anything new to say?




Enlarge This Image

U.S. Navy, via Associated Press

A photo taken aboard the American Aircraft carrier Ticonderoga, September 1944.





INFERNO


The World at War, 1939-1945

By Max Hastings

Illustrated. 729 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $35
.

The answer is, emphatically, yes. “Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945” sums up and surpasses all his previous publications: a new, original and necessary history, in many ways the crowning of a life’s work. A professional war correspondent who has personally witnessed armed conflicts in Vietnam, the Falkland Islands and other danger zones, Hastings has a sober, unromantic and realistic view of battle that puts him into a different category from the armchair generals whose gung-ho, schoolboy attitude to war fills the pages of a great majority of military histories. He writes with grace, fluency and authority. “Inferno” offers an account of the war that concentrates on the lived experience of the men and women who took part in it. On almost every page there is memorable and arresting material from interviews, diaries, letters, memoirs and personal documents of many kinds. The huge cast of characters and witnesses gives the book an almost Tolstoyan sweep, as it ranges across the world, from Dunkirk to Iwo Jima, Stalingrad to Guadalcanal.

Hastings is at his absolute best when he is describing battle scenes, both on land and at sea. Deftly chosen quotations are effortlessly integrated into the narratives, providing color and making the action come alive. They are supplemented where appropriate with clear and informative maps and easily digestible statistics. This is at its core very much a military history, despite the space devoted to the experiences of civilians. Brisk assessments are delivered on the competence or (mostly) incompetence of leading generals and the performance of their troops; in the book’s concluding chapter, Hastings pronounces his verdicts, rather like a senior general handing out medals at the end of a campaign: Montgomery was a highly competent professional who lacked the touch of genius needed for him to be numbered among the great commanders; MacArthur was a brilliant self-publicist, but outclassed as a general by the now-forgotten Lucian Truscott; Rommel was fatally compromised by his disregard for logistics; Georgi Zhukov was a superb commander in 1944, but his storming of Berlin the following spring was brutish and clumsy.

Hastings argues that the navies of the United Kingdom and the United States were their best fighting forces; he thinks the armies of the two Allied powers were mostly no match for the ruthless fighting prowess of the Germans and Japanese, whose willingness to sacrifice themselves contrasted with the care taken by Allied generals to minimize casualties among their own men. Red Army troops behaved in a manner not unlike that of the Germans, their reckless disregard for their own safety driven on by the knowledge that the Soviet secret police would shoot them if they hesitated. What shifted the balance in favor of the Allies in the end was America’s industrial might, which by 1943 was supplying enormous quantities of munitions and equipment without which the Red Army’s victory would have taken far longer to achieve.

Germans, Russians and Japanese soldiers and civilians get their say in this book as well as Americans and British. Ninety percent of German troops killed in the war died on the Eastern Front, and Hastings gives this fact appropriately expansive treatment. He is as hard on the racism, complacency and incompetence of the British in the face of the Japanese invasion of Malaya and Singapore as he is on the cruelty and brutality of the Japanese Army as it tortured, raped and massacred its way across China, Indonesia and Malaya. As the British fled, denying Asians access to evacuation ships to make room for themselves, the young Singaporean politician, Lee Kwan Yew, exclaimed: “That is the end of the British Empire.” Millions of people died of hunger, disease and mass murder under German rule in Europe, but millions died too from starvation in India under British rule
Yet Hastings is not always so evenhanded in his coverage. In describing the invasion, conquest and division of Poland by Hitler and Stalin in 1939, for example, he devotes considerable space to the Soviet arrest, deportation and murder of Poles in their zone of occupation, but says little about the mass imprisonment, deportation, enslavement and murder of hundreds of thousands of Poles by the Nazis. His brilliant and evocative account of the “winter war,” in which Finland defended itself with surprising effectiveness against Stalin’s invasion in 1939-40, outclasses his somewhat perfunctory narrative of the Polish campaign. And his skillful touch can fail him when it comes to dealing with nonmilitary aspects of the war. There are too many sweeping generalizations about national character. The Poles have a “propensity for fantasy,” for example, while “Britain’s antimilitarist tradition was a source of pride to its people.” Neither claim is true; indeed, British national culture in the 1930s was suffused with celebratory memories of national military victories in Europe and across the British Empire, while pacifism was the province of only a tiny minority.
On occasion, too, the military historian’s propensity to judge everything in terms of military effectiveness can lead Hastings astray. “One of Hitler’s greatest mistakes,” he writes, “from the viewpoint of his own interests, was that he attempted to reshape the eastern lands that fell under his suzerainty in accordance with Nazi ideology while still fighting the war.” Nazi brutality certainly alienated many Ukrainians and others whose resentment at years of murderous Soviet exploitation made them ready to welcome the Germans when they arrived in 1941; but for Hitler, of course, the exploitation and extermination of Slav “subhumans” was one of the major purposes of the war.

And the chapter on the Holocaust is among the weaker ones in the book. Hastings sees the annihilation of the Jews as a military mistake, but in fact it did not entail “diverting scarce manpower and transport to a program of mass murder while the outcome of the war still hung in the balance,” at least not on any significant scale. The “euthanasia” campaign in which Hitler ordered the murder of 70,000 mentally ill or handicapped Germans was not directed exclusively against “inmates of psychiatric units,” but actually began with the forcible removal of thousands of children from their parental homes. These are minor objections, however. As military history in the round, conveying to a 21st-century readership the human experience of this greatest and most savage of human conflicts in history, “Inferno” is superb.

Richard J. Evans is the Regius professor of history at the University of Cambridge and the president of Wolfson College, Cambridge. He is the author of “The Third Reich at War

Lana Peters, Stalin’s Daughter, Dies at 85 - NY Times

Born Svetlana Stalina, Stalin's daughter changed her name twice and lived in several countries after her famous defection.

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Published: November 28, 2011

Her three successive names were signposts on a twisted, bewildering road that took her from Stalin’s Kremlin, where she was the “little princess,” to the West in a celebrated defection, then back to the Soviet Union in a puzzling homecoming, and finally to decades of obscurity, wandering and poverty.

At her birth, on Feb. 28, 1926, she was named Svetlana Stalina, the only daughter and last surviving child of the brutal Soviet tyrant Josef Stalin. After he died in 1953, she took her mother’s last name, Alliluyeva. In 1970, after her defection and an American marriage, she became and remained Lana Peters.

Ms. Peters died of colon cancer on Nov. 22 in Richland County, Wis., the county’s corporation counsel, Benjamin Southwick, said on Monday. She was 85.

Her death, like the last years of her life, occurred away from public view. There were hints of it online and in Richland Center, the Wisconsin town in which she lived, though a local funeral home said to be handling the burial would not confirm the death. A county official in Wisconsin thought she might have died several months ago. Phone calls seeking information from a surviving daughter, Olga Peters, who now goes by the name Chrese Evans, were rebuffed, as were efforts to speak to her in person in Portland, Ore., where she lives and works.

Ms. Peters’s initial prominence came only from being Stalin’s daughter, a distinction that fed public curiosity about her life across three continents and many decades. She said she hated her past and felt like a slave to extraordinary circumstances. Yet she drew on that past, and the infamous Stalin name, in writing two best-selling autobiographies.

Long after fleeing her homeland, she seemed to be still searching for something — sampling religions, from Hinduism to Christian Science, falling in love and constantly moving. Her defection took her from India, through Europe, to the United States. After moving back to Moscow in 1984, and from there to Soviet Georgia, friends told of her going again to America, then to England, then to France, then back to America, then to England again, and on and on. All the while she faded from the public eye.

Ms. Peters was said to have lived in a cabin with no electricity in northern Wisconsin; another time, in a Roman Catholic convent in Switzerland. In 1992, she was reported to be living in a shabby part of West London in a home for elderly people with emotional problems.

“You can’t regret your fate,” Ms. Peters once said, “although I do regret my mother didn’t marry a carpenter.”

‘Little Sparrow’

Her life was worthy of a Russian novel. It began with a loving relationship with Stalin, who had taken the name, meaning “man of steel,” as a young man. (He was born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili.) Millions died under his brutally repressive rule, but at home he called his daughter “little sparrow,” cuddled and kissed her, showered her with presents, and entertained her with American movies.

She became a celebrity in her country, compared to Shirley Temple in the United States. Thousands of babies were named Svetlana. So was a perfume.

At 18, she was setting the table in a Kremlin dining room when Churchill happened upon her. They had a spirited conversation.

But all was not perfect even then. The darkest moment of her childhood came when her mother, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, Stalin’s second wife, committed suicide in 1932. Svetlana, who was 6, was told that her mother had died of appendicitis. She did not learn the truth for a decade.

In her teenage years, her father was consumed by the war with Germany and grew distant and sometimes abusive. One of her brothers, Yakov, was captured by the Nazis, who offered to exchange him for a German general. Stalin refused, and Yakov was killed.

In her memoirs she told of how Stalin had sent her first love, a Jewish filmmaker, to Siberia for 10 years. She wanted to study literature at Moscow University, but Stalin demanded that she study history. She did. After graduation, again following her father’s wishes, she became a teacher, teaching Soviet literature and the English language. She then worked as a literary translator.

A year after her father broke up her first romance, she told him she wanted to marry another Jewish man, Grigory Morozov, a fellow student. Stalin slapped her and refused to meet him. This time, however, she had her way. She married Mr. Morozov in 1945. They had one child, Iosif, before divorcing in 1947.

Her second marriage, in 1949, was more to Stalin’s liking. The groom, Yuri Zhdanov, was the son of Stalin’s right-hand man, Andrei Zhdanov. The couple had a daughter, Yekaterina, the next year. But they, too, divorced soon afterward.

Her world grew darker in her father’s last years. Nikita S. Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor as Soviet leader, wrote in his memoirs about the New Year’s party in 1952 when Stalin grabbed Svetlana by the hair and forced her to dance.

Defection

After Stalin died in 1953, his legacy was challenged, and the new leaders were eager to put his more egregious policies behind them. Svetlana lost many of her privileges. In the 1960s, when she fell in love with Brijesh Singh, an Indian Communist who was visiting Moscow, Soviet officials refused to let her marry him. After he became ill and died, they only reluctantly gave her permission, in early 1967, to take his ashes home to India.

Once in India, Ms. Alliluyeva, as she was known now, evaded Soviet agents in the K.G.B. and showed up at the United States Embassy in New Delhi seeking political asylum. The world watched in amazement as Stalin’s daughter, granted protection, became the most high-profile Soviet exile since the ballet virtuoso Rudolf Nureyev defected in 1961. The United States quickly dispatched a C.I.A. officer to help her travel through Italy to neutral Switzerland, but American officials worried that accepting her into the United States could damage its improving relations with Moscow. Finally, President Lyndon B. Johnson, on humanitarian grounds, agreed to admit her but asked that there be as little fanfare as possible.

Unknown to Washington at the time, the K.G.B. was discussing plans to assassinate Ms. Alliluyeva, according to former agency officials who were quoted by The Washington Times in 1992. But, they said, the K.G.B. backed off for fear an assassination would be traced back to it too easily.

Her arrival in New York, in April 1967, was more triumphant than low-key. Reporters and photographers were waiting at the airport, and she held a news conference in which she denounced the Soviet regime. Her autobiography, “Twenty Letters to a Friend,” was published later that year, bringing her more than $2.5 million. In 1969 she recounted her journey from the Soviet Union in a second memoir, “Only One Year.”

Settling in Princeton, N.J., Ms. Alliluyeva made a public show of burning her Soviet passport, saying she would never return to the Soviet Union. She denounced her father as “a moral and spiritual monster,” called the Soviet system “profoundly corrupt” and likened the K.G.B. to the Gestapo.

Writing in Esquire magazine, Garry Wills and Ovid Demaris — under the headline “How the Daughter of Stalin Denounced Communism and Embraced God, America and Apple Pie” — said the Svetlana Alliluyeva saga added up to “the Reader’s Digest ultimate story.”

As the Kremlin feared, Ms. Alliluyeva became a weapon in the cold war. In 1968, she denounced the trial of four Soviet dissidents as “a mockery of justice.” On Voice of America radio, Soviet citizens heard her declare that life in the United States was “free, gay and full of bright colors.”

Another Marriage

In interviews, however, she acknowledged loneliness. She missed her son, Iosif, who was 22 when she left Russia, and her daughter, Yekaterina, who was then 17. But she seemed to find new vibrancy in 1970, when she married William Wesley Peters. Mr. Peters had been chief apprentice to the architect Frank Lloyd Wright and, for a time, the husband of Wright’s adopted daughter.

Wright’s widow, Olgivanna Wright, encouraged the Peters-Alliluyeva marriage, even though the adopted daughter was Mrs. Wright’s biological daughter from a previous marriage. That daughter was also named Svetlana, and Mrs. Wright saw mystical meaning in the match.

The couple lived with Mrs. Wright and others at Taliesin West, the architect’s famous desert compound in Scottsdale, Ariz. There, Ms. Peters began chafing at the strict communal lifestyle enforced by Mrs. Wright, finding her as authoritarian as her father. Mr. Peters, meanwhile, objected to his wife’s buying a house in a nearby resort area, declaring he didn’t want “a two-bit suburban life.”

Within two years, they separated. Ms. Peters was granted custody of their 8-month-old daughter, Olga. They divorced in 1973.

Information about the next few years is sketchier. Ms. Peters became a United States citizen in 1978 and later told The Trenton Times that she had registered as a Republican and donated $500 to the conservative magazine National Review, saying it was her favorite publication.

She and Olga moved to California, living there in several places before uprooting themselves again in 1982, this time for England so that Olga could enroll in an English boarding school. She also began to speak more favorably of her father, Time magazine reported, and perhaps felt she had betrayed him. “My father would have shot me for what I have done,” she said in 1983.

Seeking Reconciliation

At the same time, Stalin was being partly rehabilitated in the Soviet Union, and Soviet officials, after blocking Ms. Peters’s attempts to communicate with her children in Russia, relaxed their grip. Iosif, then 38 and practicing as a physician, began calling regularly. He said he would try to come to England to see her.

“For this desperate woman, seeing Iosif appeared to herald a new beginning,” Time said.

Abruptly, however, Iosif was refused permission to travel. So in November 1984, Ms. Peters and 13-year-old Olga — who was distraught because she had not been consulted about the move — went to Moscow and asked to be taken back. Lana Peters now denounced the West. She had not known “one single day” of freedom in the West, she told reporters. She was quoted as saying that she had been a pet of the C.I.A. Any conservative views she had expressed in the United States, if they still existed, went unexpressed. When an ABC correspondent in Moscow tried to question her a few days later, she exploded in anger, exclaiming: “You are savages! You are uncivilized people! Goodbye to you all.”

Ms. Peters and Olga were given Soviet citizenship, but soon their lives worsened. The son and daughter who lived in Russia began shunning her and Olga. Defying the official atheism of the state, Olga insisted on wearing a crucifix. They moved to Tbilisi, Georgia, but it was no better than Moscow.

In April 1986, they returned to the United States, with no opposition by the Soviet authorities. Settling at first in Wisconsin, Ms. Peters disavowed the anti-Western things she had said upon her arrival in Moscow, saying she had been mistranslated, particularly the statement about being a pet of the C.I.A. Olga returned to school in England.

Quiet Years

Ms. Peters said she was now impoverished. She had given much of her book profits to charity, she said, and was saddled with debt and failed investments. An odd, formless odyssey began. Friends said she appeared unable to live anywhere for more than two years.

Mr. Peters died in 1991. Ms. Peters’s son, Iosif, died in November 2008.

Besides her daughter Olga, now Ms. Evans, Ms. Peters is survived by her daughter Yekaterina Zhdanov, a scientist who goes by Katya and is living on the Kamchatka Peninsula in Eastern Siberia studying a volcano, according to The Associated Press. Reached later on Monday by e-mail, Ms. Evans told The A.P. that her mother had died in a nursing home in Richland Center, where she had lived for three years. “Please respect my privacy during this sad time,” the wire agency quoted her as saying.

Ms. Peters was said to enjoy sewing and reading, mainly nonfiction, choosing not to own a television set. In an interview with The Wisconsin State Journal in 2010, she was asked if her father had loved her. She thought he did, she said, because she had red hair and freckles, like his mother.

But she could not forgive his cruelty to her. “He broke my life,” she said. “I want to explain to you. He broke my life.”

And he left a shadow from which she could never emerge. “Wherever I go,” she said, “here, or Switzerland, or India, or wherever. Australia. Some island. I will always be a political prisoner of my father’s name.”


Elizabeth A. Harris and Lee van der Voo contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 29, 2011


An earlier version of this article misstated the last name of Ms. Peters’s late son, Iosif. It is Alliluyev, not Morozov.

Stalin's daughter Lana Peters dies in US of cancer - 29 Nov 2011

The only daughter of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin has died in the US at the age of 85

Svetlana Alliluyeva, also known as Lana Peters, died of colon cancer at a care home in the state of Wisconsin last Tuesday, officials say.

Her defection from the Soviet Union in 1967 was a propaganda coup for the US. She wrote four books, including two best-selling memoirs.

But she said she could not escape the shadow of her father

'Little sparrow'

When Peters arrived in the US, she said she had come for the "self-expression that has been denied me for so long in Russia".

She said her defection was partly motivated by the Soviet authorities' poor treatment of Brajesh Singh, an Indian communist whom she had a relationship with
Although she later referred to Singh as her husband, the two were never allowed to marry.

Peters went to India in 1966 to spread Singh's ashes, but instead of returning to the Soviet Union she walked into the US embassy to seek political asylum.

She burned her passport, denouncing communism and her father, whom she called "a moral and spiritual monster".

She graduated from Moscow University in 1949, initially working as a teacher and translator.

Peters was married three times and had two daughters and a son.

Her first memoir, Twenty Letters to a Friend, was published in 1967 and made more than $2.5m (£1.6m).

She took the name Lana Peters upon marrying architect William Wesley Peters in the US.

The couple settled in central Wisconsin and had a daughter, Olga, before divorcing in 1973.
She returned to the Soviet Union briefly in the 1980s, renouncing the US, but left again after feuding with relatives.

In an interview in 1990 with Britain's Independent newspaper, Peters said she had no money and was living with Olga in a rented house.

Stalin, who died in 1953, is deemed responsible for the deaths of millions of his countrymen.

Peters - who was six years old when her mother took her own life - was once close to her father, who called her his "little sparrow". But they grew distant in his final years.

He sent her first love, a Jewish filmmaker, to Siberia.

Her brother, Jacob, died in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II when her father refused to exchange him for a German general, and her other brother, Vasili, died an alcoholic, aged 40.

Lana Peters bemoaned the constant association with her father.

"People say, 'Stalin's daughter, Stalin's daughter,' meaning I'm supposed to walk around with a rifle and shoot the Americans," she once said.

"Or they say, 'No, she came here. She is an American citizen.' That means I'm with a bomb against the others.
No, I'm neither one. I'm somewhere in between."

While Peters denounced her father's regime, she also blamed other communist party leaders for the Soviet Union's policy of sending millions to labour camps.

Speaking to the BBC in 1990, Peters said that life in the USSR became much easier for everyone, herself included, after Nikita Khrushchev came to power.

She revealed that Khrushchev showed her his speech to the 20th party congress in advance, so she wouldn't be shocked. In this address, three years after Stalin's death, Khrushchev denounced his predecessor as a brutal despot.

Interviewed in Cambridge, Peters said "When my mother left us, he [Stalin] was left completely alone. And I think what came next, in the late 30s and after the war in the 40s - I think that was a result of his complete loneliness on top of the world. Nobody would argue with him anymore."

How Stalin's daughter defected in India

The only daughter of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin has died in the US, aged 85. In 1967 she travelled to India to scatter the ashes of her Indian Communist lover in the river Ganges. During that visit she defected to the US causing a political sensation. Indian journalist Inder Malhotra recalls the scandal.

Svetlana Alliluyeva, also known as Lana Peters, had a strong connection with India.

She was what is known as the common law wife of Brajesh Singh, one of the many Indian Communists who made Moscow their home in the 1930s and thereafter.

In early 1967 Mr Singh died. Svetlana saw to it that he was cremated according to Hindu rites and then decided to bring his ashes to India to consign them to the Ganges river, held sacred by Hindus.

This took time because Soviet leaders tried hard to dissuade her from making that journey.

Political upheavals

Enough evidence emerged later to show that Alexi Kosygin, then prime minister, had personally told her that she was taking a grave risk as orthodox Hindus sometimes burned the widow along with her husband.

But she was determined to press ahead despite the protestations.

An Indian visa was no problem because, apart from other reasons, Brajesh's nephew, Dinesh Singh, was a confidant of then prime minister Indira Gandhi and a member of her council of ministers.


After completing the rituals in her late husband's ancestral village in Uttar Pradesh, she arrived in Delhi at a time when India was in the throes of a general election, the first without Jawaharlal Nehru - India's first prime minister after independence.

The political upheavals consumed India: the Congress party was returned to power, though with a considerably reduced majority and there was a tense leadership struggle between Indira Gandhi and Morarji Desai, who would end up being her deputy prime minister.

It was because of the excitement over these developments that neither the media nor any of the political leaders took any interest in Svetlana's presence in Delhi.

And then the sensational news broke one morning, with nuclear force, that Stalin's daughter had defected to the United States on Indian soil.

The Soviet Union was incensed and said so but there was nothing India could do. Tension between Moscow and Delhi persisted for some time despite previously close relations.

American escape

The story of the great escape could not have been more dramatic.

Svetlana was staying at the Soviet embassy where Ambassador Nikolai Benediktov was advising her to return home.

Telling him that she was going out to finalise her travel arrangements, she called a taxi and drove straight to the American embassy, only a short distance away.

The embassy had shut for the day. She told the duty officer who she was and what she wanted.

In panic, the duty officer rang up Ambassador Chester Bowles and told him that he must come to his office immediately to deal with a matter that could not be discussed on the phone.

Mr Bowles arrived, talked to Svetlana and gave her a lined pad to write down why she wanted to go the US, not to her own country.

She duly did, and when published in her book a year later, it turned out to be a cogent and readable document.
While Svetlana was writing her piece, Ambassador Bowles sent an "Eyes Only" telegram to the Secretary of State Dean Rusk explaining the situation and asking for instructions.

He took care to conclude his cable with the words: "If I do not hear from the State Department by midnight (Indian time), I would, on my responsibility, give her the visa."

According to the ambassador's subsequent account of the incident, as he had expected, there was not a word from Washington by the deadline.

So he arranged to send Svetlana to the airport in the company of a CIA officer to catch a flight to Rome.

Only after she had reached there safely did the sensational news leak out.


BBC, 29 Nov 2011

Trial of Khmer Rogue Nuon Chea, Khieu Samphan, Ieng Sary - BBC

Khmer Rouge leaders facing trial
A UN-backed genocide tribunal in Cambodia is set to begin its second trial, this time of the top-most leaders of the Khmer Rouge regime.

Up to two million people were killed or starved to death under Khmer Rouge rule in the 1970s.

Three main leaders - Nuon Chea, Khieu Samphan and Ieng Sary - will be in court. Another, Ieng Thirith, has been found incapable of standing trial because of ill health.

Former Khmer Rouge prison chief Kaing Guek Eav, better known as Comrade Duch, was convicted last year in the tribunal's first case

1. Nuon Cheah

Nuon Chea, who is viewed as the chief ideologue of the movement, has been charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity.

He is commonly known as Brother Number Two as he was second in command to the founder and leader of the Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot.

Nuon Chea defected from the Khmer Rouge in 1998 and was granted a pardon by Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen.

In December 2002 he was called to testify on behalf of the former Khmer Rouge general Sam Bith, who was sentenced to life in prison for ordering the kidnap and murder of three Western backpackers in 1994.

So far he has denied being involved in the atrocities that went on during the Khmer Rouge regime, but critics suggest that at the very least he was fully informed of what was happening.

2. Khieu Samphan

Khieu Samphan was the Khmer Rouge's official head of state.

He was the public face of the Khmer Rouge, and defected at the same time as Nuon Chea.

In its detention order, the prosecution alleged that Khieu Samphan "aided and abetted" the policies of the Khmer Rouge, which were "characterised by murder, extermination, imprisonment, persecution on political grounds and other inhumane acts".

Khieu Samphan insists that, as head of state, he was never directly responsible for the deaths which happened under the regime.

Until his arrest, he was said to spend most of his time at his home in Pailin, once the movement's jungle headquarters, reading, listening to music or gardening.

3. Ieng Sary

Ieng Sary, also known as Brother Number Three, served as the country's foreign minister and was often the only point of contact between Cambodia's rulers and the outside world.

He is said to have been responsible for convincing many educated Cambodians who had fled the Khmer Rouge to return to help rebuild the country.

Many were then tortured and executed as part of the purge of intellectuals.

Ieng Sary became the first senior leader to defect in 1996 - and as a result was granted a royal pardon.

The United Nations says such a pardon cannot protect someone from prosecution, but Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen has previously warned that going after Ieng Sary could re-ignite civil unrest in Cambodia

4. Ieng Thirith

Ieng Thirith was one of the Khmer Rouge's founding members and its most powerful woman.

Her sister was married to the movement's leader, Pol Pot, and she was married to Ieng Sary.

She served as the regime's social affairs minister. Prosecutors say she knew that tens of thousands of people were dying from starvation and disease on brutal collective farms - but did nothing to stop the disaster.

She denies any wrongdoing and is now ill. Judges say she is not mentally fit to stand trial, and have recommended that the case against her be suspended.

5. Previous case: Comrade Dutch

Comrade Duch (Kaing Guek Eav) was convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity in July 2010.

A former maths teacher, he oversaw the Tuol Sleng interrogation centre in the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh.

There as many as 15,000 men, women and children are thought to have been imprisoned, tortured and killed.

He says he acted under orders and would have been killed if he had failed to obey them.

6. Others who escaped

The man most wanted for crimes against humanity in Cambodia will never be brought to justice.

Pol Pot, the founder and leader of the Khmer Rouge, died in a camp along the border with Thailand in 1998.

Other key figures have also died, including Ta Mok, the regime's military commander and one of Pol Pot's most most-feared associates.

Survivors of the Khmer Rouge regime hope that the process of bringing the remaining leaders to justice will move on swiftly, before they become too old or ill to appear in the dock.

The Khmer Rogue

The Khmer Rouge was the ruling party in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, but during this short time it was responsible for one of the worst mass killings of the 20th Century.

The brutal regime claimed the lives of more than a million people - and some estimates say up to 2.5 million perished.

Under the Marxist leader Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge tried to take Cambodia back to the Middle Ages, forcing millions of people from the cities to work on communal farms in the countryside.

But this dramatic attempt at social engineering had a terrible cost, and whole families died from execution, starvation, disease and overwork.

Communist philosophy

The Khmer Rouge had its origins in the 1960s, as the armed wing of the Communist Party of Kampuchea - the name the Communists used for Cambodia.

Based in remote jungle and mountain areas in the north-east of the country, the group initially made little headway.

But after a right-wing military coup toppled head of state Prince Norodom Sihanouk in 1970, the Khmer Rouge entered into a political coalition with him and began to attract increasing support.

In a civil war that continued for nearly five years, it gradually increased its control in the countryside.

Khmer Rouge forces finally took over the capital, Phnom Penh, and therefore the nation as a whole in 1975.

During his time in the remote north-east, Pol Pot had been influenced by the surrounding hill tribes, who were self-sufficient in their communal living, had no use for money and were "untainted" by Buddhism.

When he came to power, he and his henchmen quickly set about transforming Cambodia - now re-named Kampuchea - into what they hoped would be an agrarian utopia.

Declaring that the nation would start again at "Year Zero", Pol Pot isolated his people from the rest of the world and set about emptying the cities, abolishing money, private property and religion, and setting up rural collectives.

Anyone thought to be an intellectual of any sort was killed. Often people were condemned for wearing glasses or knowing a foreign language.

Tens of thousands of the educated middle-classes were tortured and executed in special centres.

The most notorious of these centres was the S21 jail in Phnom Penh, where more than 17,000 men, women and children were imprisoned during the regime's four years in power.

Hundreds of thousands of others died from disease, starvation or exhaustion as members of the Khmer Rouge - often just teenagers themselves - forced people to do back-breaking work.

Opening up

The Khmer Rouge government was finally overthrown in 1979 by invading Vietnamese troops, after a series of violent border confrontations.

The higher echelons of the party retreated to remote areas of the country, where they remained active for a while but gradually became less and less powerful.

In the years that followed, as Cambodia began the process of reopening to the international community, the full horrors of the regime became apparent.

Survivors told their stories to shocked audiences, and in the 1980s the Hollywood movie The Killing Fields brought the plight of the Khmer Rouge victims to worldwide attention.

Pol Pot was denounced by his former comrades in a show trial in July 1997, and sentenced to house arrest in his jungle home.

But less than a year later he was dead - denying the millions of people who were affected by this brutal regime the chance to bring him to justice

The Nuon Cheah Defence - Phnom Penh Post

In an intimate two-hour history lesson as told from the viewpoint of the Khmer Rouge, “Brother Number 2” Nuon Chea portrayed himself as a defender of the Cambodian nation yesterday, telling the court that the actions of he and other regime leaders had been to protect the country from annihilation by Vietnam.

“I have been waiting for this opportunity for a long time,” Nuon Chea told the tribunal, adding that he wanted “to give the facts to my beloved Cambodian people about what happened”. The former Khmer Rouge leader – who stands accused of crimes against humanity and genocide – spent the next two hours reading from a prepared statement that explained away prosecutors’ allegations regarding the regime’s forced migration of urban population centres, the subject of the first in a number of mini trials that will comprise Case 002.

An Unorthdox Defense

Nuon Chea launched his defence by alleging Vietnam had tried to occupy Cambodia and exterminate the Khmer race over an 80-year period, beginning with the formation of the communist parties of Indochina in 1930. “From the beginning, the Vietnamese employed every trick available to destroy the Khmer people,” he said. “Vietnam has ideals of invasion, expansion, land-grabbing and racial extermination.”

To this day, Vietnam continues to plant illegal immigrants in Cambodia, he added, saying that the Kingdom’s neighbour is trying to “swallow” it, “suffocating it like a python would a deer”.

“The Vietnamese factor is the main factor that caused confusion in Democratic Kampuchea from 1975 to 1979 [the period of the Khmer Rouge regime],” he said.

It was a less-than-traditional way to begin a legal case, said Anne Heindel of the Documentation Center of Cambodia.

“It is a fascinating view of history … but a lot of the public will simply not understand or remember what he is talking about,” she said.

Placing Blame

The Trial Chamber has split Case 002 into a series of mini trials, with the first limited to forced movements of the population from urban areas in 1975 as well as some of the policies and organisational framework of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, or Khmer Rouge.

Because Case 002 has been split this way, the first trial will inevitably involve a great deal of examination of historical politics, much more so than future trials concerning forced marriage, interrogation or execution centres, Heindel told the Post.

“It appears we are going to hear arguments that it was all the fault of the lower levels, and ‘we had no control’,” Heindel said in reference to Nuon Chea’s claim that much of the Khmer Rouge cadre was polluted by bad elements – drunken, gambling, unemployed “vagabonds”.

Nuon Chea’s detailed statement, concerning the history of communism in Indochina and how the Khmer Rouge was effectively forced into action by Vietnamese “aggression”, appeared to comprise the bulk of his explanation for the brutal policies of the Khmer Rouge.

He intimately detailed a tranche of political meetings and correspondence within the communist party in Cambodia and between them and their Vietnamese counterparts, pointing to the political tensions at the time between Cambodia, Vietnam and the US as effectively forcing the hand of the senior leaders of the Khmer Rouge.

The accused rounded out his speech by pointing to Vietnam’s “illegal invasion” of Cambodia in January 1979 – an invasion that effectively spelled the end of the Khmer Rouge regime – and pointed to modern day examples he said proved Vietnam was still trying to “conquer” the Kingdom.

Complexity in the Court

Nuon Chea – and fellow defendants Ieng Sary and Khieu Samphan – will only have to answer to a narrow set of charges during the first mini trial, which does not include other criminal charges related to execution sites, forced labour or forced marriage and genocide.

Noun Chea’s defence attorney Michiel Pestman said that this decision by the tribunal has made what are already complex proceedings bewildering for both victims and the media.

“The public is left with the impression that all of the charges would be discussed at this trial, but that is not the case – this first trial is very limited,” Pestman said.

Despite the limited charges at play in the first trial, the co-prosecutors spent the first day and a half of opening statements delivering a graphic outline of the brutality and horror of the Khmer Rouge regime.

In his concluding remarks, British prosecutor Andrew Cayley said that from Geneva to Pyongyang, the three elderly co-accused had bragged about the bloody slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Cambodians and defended their actions to the international community.

“[The accused] are common murderers of an entire generation of Cambodians,” Cayley concluded. “They robbed decades of development and prosperity, left gaping holes in every family – nothing is left unhurt or unaffected by what these three elderly men have done.”

WWII Plans to invade Britain

German shock troops would have landed at Dover, dressed in British uniforms, if the Luftwaffe had won the Battle of Britain, newly-released files suggest.

Details of the plan to invade Britain emerge from a post-war debrief of a German soldier and are in an MI5 file made public at the National Archives.

Cpl Werner Janowski was interrogated about his wartime work for the German Intelligence Service, the Abwehr.

The plan was abandoned because invading troops would have faced RAF attack.

Dover was to be the focal point of the invasion, but troops would have landed elsewhere along the south coast, as well as in Scotland and the south of Ireland.

Dr Ed Hampshire, principal records specialist at the National Archives, said: "The idea of shock troops wearing enemy uniforms, as they had in the Low Countries, is fascinating. It's really The Eagle Has Landed stuff."

"It gives an indication of what might have happened if the Battle of Britain had gone the other way," he said.

Continue reading the main story
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It gives an indication of what might have happened if the Battle of Britain had gone the other way”
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Dr Ed Hampshire

National Archives

After the shock troops had captured the docks at Dover, the plan was for the main contingent of German troops to be brought over in barges and disembark at the docks.

Cpl Janowski described how his unit trained extensively in invasion techniques on the beaches of France during September and early October 1940.

But at the end of October some units were transferred elsewhere and they realised the invasion - Operation Sea Lion - had been called off.

Hitler cancelled the invasion because Hermann Goering's Luftwaffe had been unable to destroy the RAF and without air superiority the German troops would have been too vulnerable.

Cpl Janowski said the RAF destroyed most of the invasion barges at Dunkirk in bombing raids in December 1940.

Strategy detail

The plan involved a huge aerial bombardment of the Dover area prior to the shock troops' landing, he explained.

Cpl Janowski then went into great detail about the route they would have taken to try to and secure the town: "Having effected a landing they would proceed along the cliffs to a point outside Dover where there were steps leading down to the beach and from this point they were to continue along the beach.

"They would regain the cliff head by means of some steps near Dover station and then pass alongside the railway station and take possession of three docks on which were gun emplacements.

"They would then signal to Luftwaffe that the docks were in their possession."

By the time Cpl Janowski was being interrogated, the war was already over and MI5's focus was on another enemy - the Soviet Union.

Cpl Janowski had been employed later in the war by the Jahnke Buro, a section of the Abwehr which it was feared had been infiltrated by Soviet agents.

MI5 feared some German agents, like Janowski's superior Wilhelm Hollmann, might go to work for the KGB.

German WWII plan to invade Britain revealed in MI5 file/ BBC
26 Aug 2010

Sub Escape of WWII

Submarine escape: A WWII survival tale from Kefalonia
By Tim Clayton
Military historian
BBC

Seventy years ago, off the Greek island of Kefalonia, the British submarine HMS Perseus hit an Italian mine, sparking one of the greatest and most controversial survival stories of World War II.

The clear waters of the Mediterranean were a death trap for British submarines in World War II.

Some were bombed from the air, others hunted with sonar and depth charges, and many, perhaps most, collided with mines.

Two fifths of the subs that ventured into the Mediterranean were sunk and when a submarine sank it became a communal coffin - everyone on board died. That was the rule.

In fact, during the whole of the war there were only four escapes from stricken British submarines. And the most remarkable of these took place on 6 December 1941, when HMS Perseus plummeted to the seabed.

Enigma

When she left the British submarine base at Malta at the end of November 1941, HMS Perseus had on board her 59 crew and two passengers, one of whom was John Capes, a 31-year-old Navy stoker en route to Alexandria.
Tall, dark, handsome and a bit of an enigma, Capes had been educated at Dulwich College, and as the son of a diplomat he would naturally have been officer class rather than one of the lowliest of the mechanics who looked after the engines.

On the rough winter night of 6 December, Perseus was on the surface of the sea 3km (2 miles) off the coast of Kefalonia, recharging her batteries under cover of darkness in preparation for another day underwater.

According to newspaper articles Capes later wrote or contributed to, he was relaxing in a makeshift bunk converted from a spare torpedo tube when, with no warning, there was a devastating explosion.

The boat twisted, plunged, and hit the bottom with what Capes described as a "nerve-shattering jolt".

His bunk reared up and threw him across the compartment. The lights went out.

Capes guessed they had hit a mine. Finding that he could stand, he groped for a torch. In the increasingly foul air and rising water of the engine room he found "the mangled bodies of a dozen dead".

But that was as far as he could get. The engine room door was forced shut by the pressure of water on the other side. "It was creaking under the great pressure. Jets and trickles from the rubber joint were seeping through," said Capes.

He dragged any stokers who showed signs of life towards the escape hatch and fitted them and himself with Davis Submarine Escape Apparatus, a rubber lung with an oxygen bottle, mouthpiece and goggles
This equipment had only been tested to a depth of 100ft (30m). The depth gauge showed just over 270ft, and as far as Capes knew, no-one had ever made an escape from such a depth.

In fact the gauge was broken, over-estimating the depth by 100ft, but time was running out. It was difficult to breathe now.

He flooded the compartment, lowered the canvas trunk beneath the escape hatch and with great difficulty released the damaged bolts on the hatch.

He pushed his injured companions into the trunk, up through the hatch and away into the cold sea above. Then he took a last swig of rum from his blitz bottle, ducked under and passed through the hatch himself.

"I let go, and the buoyant oxygen lifted me quickly upward. Suddenly I was alone in the middle of the great ocean.

"The pain became frantic, my lungs and whole body as fit to burst apart. Agony made me dizzy. How long can I last?

"Then, with the suddenness of certainty, I burst to the surface and wallowed in a slight swell with whitecaps here and there."

But having made the deepest escape yet recorded, his ordeal was not over.

His fellow injured stokers had not made it to the surface with him so he found himself alone in the middle of a cold December sea.

In the darkness he spotted a band of white cliffs and realised he had no choice but to strike out for those.
Story doubted

The next morning, Capes was found unconscious by two fishermen on the shore of Kefalonia.

For the following 18 months he was passed from house to house, to evade the Italian occupiers. He lost 70lb (32kg) in weight and dyed his hair black in an effort to blend in.

He recalled later: "Always, at the moment of despair, some utterly poor but friendly and patriotic islander would risk the lives of all his family for my sake.

"They even gave me one of their prize possessions, a donkey called Mareeka. There was one condition attached to her - I had to take a solemn vow not to eat her."

He was finally taken off the island on a fishing boat in May 1943, in a clandestine operation organised by the Royal Navy.

A dangerous, roundabout journey of 640km took him to Turkey and from there back to the submarine service in Alexandria.

Despite being awarded a medal for his escape, Capes's story was so extraordinary that many people, both within and outside the Navy, doubted it.

Was he really on the boat at all? After all, he was not on the crew list. And submarine commanders had been ordered to bolt escape hatches shut from the outside to prevent them lifting during depth charge attacks.

There were no witnesses, he had a reputation as a great storyteller, and his own written accounts after the war varied in their details.

And the depth gauge reading 270ft made his story all the harder to believe.

John Capes died in 1985 but it was not until 1997 that his story was finally verified.

In a series of dives to the wreck of Perseus, Kostas Thoctarides discovered Capes's empty torpedo tube bunk, the hatch and compartment exactly as he had described it, and finally, his blitz bottle from which he had taken that last fortifying swig of rum.

Tim Clayton is the author of Sea Wolves: the Extraordinary Story of Britain's WW2 Submarines.

BBC Radio 4's Escape from the Deep is broadcast on Friday 2 December 2011 at 1100 GMT. Or listen again on BBC iPlayer.