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Sir Martin's August Books
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20th Century
In 3 volumes,
or condensed into 1
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Jewish History Atlas
Has there been a more geographically-connected people than the Jews?
For ebook discount, enter DC 360
at checkout.
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1921 – the Storm Clouds Gather
Nazi Germany / Soviet Russia set their agendas
1250 words / 6 minute read
In Bavaria, Hitler was building up a small National Socialist (Nazi) Workers' Party. Denunciation of the Versailles Treaty was a main theme of all his speeches. It was not so much the terms of the Treaty that he had rejected as the implication that Germany had been defeated. At the end of 1920 he had been able to find financial backers willing to purchase the Völkischer Beobachter, which became the Nazi Party's newspaper. Large crowds gathered to hear him speak. In Munich, in February 1921, six and a half thousand people (five hundred more than his party membership at that time) gathered in a circus tent to hear him denounce the Allied demand for reparations. When a group within the party began talks, in his absence, to join the German Socialist Party, and proposed moving their headquarters from Munich to Berlin, Hitler resigned. He was urged to return by those who recognized his exceptional powers. He agreed to return on condition that he was made party chairman “with dictatorial powers”. Henceforth he was not only leader of the party, but the embodiment of the leadership principle, enshrined in his title (Führer, leader), and in the party salute (Heil Hitler!)
During 1921 Hitler worked to perfect the symbols which his party would use. He took meticulous care in choosing, from various designs that he found in a Munich library, the form of an eagle which would be used on the party notepaper. He adopted the ancient Aryan swastika symbol, and he designed uniforms and party emblems which members were ordered to wear at all times. On September 17 he sent out his first circular letter to party members in his new position as party chairman. In it he gave details of the party's symbols and how they were to be used. Continue Reading
Hunger in Russia, 1920, from Sir Martin's Twentieth Century, credited to Novosti, Moscow.
The 1932-33 state-imposed famine in Ukraine became known as the Holodomor,
“death inflicted by starvation”.
Read: History of the Twentieth Century
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 From Esther Gilbert
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Churchill in Palestine, 1921
525 words / 2 ½ minute read
This year marks the centenary of Winston's Churchill's visit, as Colonial Secretary, to the Middle East, which included an eight-day visit to British Mandate Palestine. Martin loved to tell the story of how the Jewish residents of Rishon le-Zion discussed how they should greet the visit of this British dignitary.
Martin knew Churchill had made this visit to Rishon in 1921, and during one of Martin's trips to Israel, he paid a visit to the town's municipal office. He asked to see their archives which surprised the officials as no one had asked to see their archives in decades, if ever. They managed to locate a stack of papers and Martin found the preparations for Churchill's visit. Continue Reading
Churchill in Tel Aviv with the city's mayor, Meir Dizengoff, March 1921;
Central Zionist Archives, from Churchill and the Jews.
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An exciting – and timely – new endeavour
A new Kindertransport memorial
600 words / 3 minute read
Sketch of the planned Ian Wolter memorial to the Kindertransport at Harwich
In the ten months leading up to the outbreak of the Second World War, 10,000 children left their parents and families, their homes and countries of birth in Germany, Austria and the Bohemian and Moravian German-occupied provinces of Czechoslovakia to come to safety in Britain. Many of their stories are known – their lives before the rise of Nazism, the discrimination they faced as they were thrown out of their schools and their families terrorised, the separation from their families, their new lives in the United Kingdom, the families they built, and how they added to British society. In the main, the children were Jewish. They had boarded trains and travelled from Berlin and Hamburg to the Hook of Holland where they boarded ferries to Harwich, and then by train to Liverpool Street Station in London. Within a few years many of their families also boarded trains. But those trains took them, not to safety in the west but to the east, to their death. Continue Reading
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The Jewish Story Explained
based on Sir Martin's book Letters to Auntie Fori
The Story of the Jewish People
Watch all the videos:
Click Here
Read: Auntie Fori
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The Jerusalem Post, https://www.jpost.com/opinion/refuseniks-of-the-past-teach-us-to-hold-onto-hope-persevere-opinion-654862,
“Refuseniks of the past teach us to hold onto hope persevere –
opinion” by Charles Savenor, posted 9 January 2021:
“Yearning to emigrate from the Soviet Union, however, was tantamount to social suicide. Historian Sir Martin Gilbert explains in The Jews of Hope, 'To express a desire to leave meant risk being fired from your job, ostracised from society, facing problems in school.' In 1986, only 1,000 Jews were allowed to emigrate, leaving behind tens of thousands of 'refuseniks' whose applications had been denied and lives upended.”
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School's Out!
But you can catch up on our videos on the
Centre's YouTube channel:
WATCH HERE
Eliyana Adler, Survival on the Margins: Polish-Jewish Refugees in the
Wartime Soviet Union
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Adam Sutliffe: What are Jews For?
WATCH HERE
Jennifer Craig-Norton: The Kindertransport: Contesting Memory
WATCH HERE
Esther Gilbert: Where History Meets Geography: Travels with an Historian
WATCH HERE
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