 It's wonderful to be back and thank you again for this splendid invitation. I now know something more about the origins of this hotel. The old park hotel in Istanbul, one of the top three, was owned by the Mengele family and I think you've got here, you saved it and then it was something horrible happened to it and it was an unfinished car park for decades. But I think this hotel retained some of the furniture and it was a splendid hotel. I remember it from the memoirs of a man called Fritz Neumarck who was the one of about a thousand immensely distinguished Germans who came here in the 30s and he describes his memoirs going to the park hotel straight off the boat. You've got some easting clothes run up by a Greek tailor then you turned up to reception of the foreign ministry and that man did very well. There were thousands of such Germans, refugees of all sorts from Hitler's Germany, some were just honest men. The one thing that went wrong at that time was that you were required to teach in Turkish in five years and some people could do it. I mean Fritz Neumarck was a genius. He learned Turkish I think in the train. But Wilhelm Röpke, who was the architect of the German Economic Miracle, was one of these people who thought with the wrong side of the brain and he just could not put the language together so they sacked him, which they didn't ought to have done. Now I don't want to waste too much on preliminaries but just to say thank you again. Now I've given the mother and father of all nightmares, which is to talk about the Second World War in half an hour. And I'd better anticipate what I'm going to say that I'm going to cut it in two bits. The first is really always boils down to the question how on earth did a country like Germany fall into that state? And the second one is how did countries interpret their success in the Second World War? And I'll try and cover as much ground as I can. Now I wrote a short history of the First World War for Penguin and Basic Books and then they said well do us a Second World War, which is of course since it's a genuine World War, not just Europe, is of course a vast enterprise and I'm not sure I got it right. Japan came off very short measure though. I read all the books about it. I've got my own memories of the Second World War. When I was about two and a half I can remember being wheeled down the suburban street in Glasgow and the air raid sirens going off and being taken to the downstairs cellar and being given a gas mask, which we kept for quite a time. My other memory of the Second World War was at the end of it. My mother said we won the war and I said does that mean we get chocolate? And it did. It did because we had an aunt in America who used to organize meetings of friends and they would club together and they would send food parcels to, well in this case Scotland and they knew that the postman would never steal, but they felt they ought to send him one too. And I can remember my experience of Victory Day was sitting and was stealing some chocolate cake coverings and making myself very sick. Now of course I will speak for many when I say that America sometimes tests one's patience, tests one's patience. Nevertheless that taste of chocolate leaves me with pro-Americanism which will never go away. Now let's talk first of all about the first aspect of this. How did Germany get into this? Now in many ways the weakest point at Nuremberg was the idea that Germany, that Hitler had planned the war. It was very difficult to pin that down. The attack on Poland, yes, but the actual world war, Göring had no trouble at all in making a fool of the Allied prosecutors. And though Ribbentrop, Hitler's foreign secretary was a wooden dump-luck of a man, he too found some good arguments. Nevertheless you left with the problem that when Hitler was faced with solid British opposition in 1918 and 1939, it was pretty clear that the British would fight, or rather it was pretty clear that the British would make the French fight. Let's get that one right. And Hitler didn't stop. Now why? The British on their side, now I was looking, this is a comparison so silly almost, I don't want to make it, but we had a bit of a scenic sort of experience when General Galtieri invaded the Falklands. You know, the idea that this screeching motor bank from a failed country would be taking over British territory, it was something which went down in an irrational way very badly indeed. And that was a small taste of the sort of national humiliation which was faced in 1939. And the British really thought that the war had broken out in March 1939 when Hitler broke his own undertaking to stop and took over the rest of Czechoslovakia. And at that point the British thought, well this man cannot be trusted. Around the same time, from November 1938, there were waves of Jews came from Germany with horror stories to tell. The Jews who got out in 1933 were allowed to take a good part of their property and weren't too badly treated and were able to re-establish themselves in England quite quickly. The ones who came out in 1938 came out penniless with horror stories and that caused of course a revulsion in England. Margaret Thatcher's parents for instance took in a Jewish pen friend of hers from Vienna and they told her stories. Then the idea that Hitler was brandishing bombers and warships and all the rest of it looked as if he was already attacking. So the war in a sense, anybody sensible said, was already in everybody's consciousness in the summer of 1939. When Hitler went into Poland, the British MPs, Chamberlain's own MPs, rebelled. They said, you stand up to that man. Chamberlain didn't want to. He said to the American ambassador something which he said, absolutely true. If we go to war after a long time we will win in the end, Europe will be in ruins, the Russians will take over half of it and the tragedy is we cannot stop it. And that revolt of the MPs taking over, driving a demoralised government with Churchill very vociferously in the lead was enough to make the British send that ultimatum. Now why did Hitler not stop? And this is, well, that man, let's not forget it, was prodigiously successful in 1939, prodigiously successful. He could almost have counted as the greatest German as he said himself of all time. Where had Germany been in 1933 and where was she in 1939? There had been an economic recovery. The old ideas of the German hegemony in Europe or old ideas were coming to pass. Now Hitler himself was obviously thinking in terms of the Germany of 1918. In 1918, after the collapse of Russia, Germany had taken over a large part of Eastern Europe. The Ukraine, for instance, which now exists, is really a German creation. So is Lithuania, so is Finland, so are the Caucasus states, especially Georgia. Why had Germany lost? And that was the question he said himself. And his obvious idea is we must get back to the Europe of Bertholdtosk. Now he was given, in my opinion, an enormous number of presents. People think that Hitler designed things from the beginning, but he was to some extent, large extent, a creature of circumstances. Now, for instance, to a wonderful historian called Brigitte Hamann, we all the fact that Hitler wasn't even an anti-Semite in 1914. In 1938, when the Nazis took over Austria, he had a letter from a Jewish couple in the Siebensterngasse and they said, Dear Chancellor, do you remember when you were a young man selling your paintings? When it rained, we took you in and gave you tea and cakes until it passed. We are being expropriated by the new government in Vienna. Please help us. Hitler scribbled on it, do nothing and threw it into the archives. That's the thing. He was a very, very vindictive man, but he did pick things up. In fact, can I think of a single chivalrous gesture that Adolf Hitler ever made? Possibly to his dog. Difficult to think otherwise. But he picked up anti-Semitism in about 1920. Possibly something to do with the inflation, I'm not sure, and rang with that particular ball rather embarrassingly at the time because anti-Semitism wasn't a popular cause in Germany at that time. The Catholic bishops, for instance, condemned it because they said it will stop Jewish tourists from coming and staying in the Heemseh hotels if this goes on. But a lot of what happened with him is that he's a creature of circumstance and now he has two big virtues. I once, well, advantages, let's say. The first thing was, now, bear in mind that it's very, very difficult to set up a small party. Usually what happens is it snobles, Poujard in France, New Kip in England, I suppose Ross Perot in the way in the States. You start off being well bankrolled, a huge pile of indignant supporters and then as time goes by, people begin to hate each other. The usual rule about small parties is that the smaller the party, the more people it expels. The chairman walks off with the tail of the vice-chairman's wife and they start splitting. The Nazis didn't and it's because Hitler was a very astute party manager. He knew when to charm, which is an aspect of Hitler people forget. But above all, he had that terrific thing if you want management. I wonder whether in business schools, people actually teach you this, that the essential thing is to time your explosions of bad temper. And Hitler could do it to perfection. People would come in and say with their list of grievances and he would bang on the table, that sort of thing, very effective. And the other thing was that he managed the money, which is all important because the Nazi party was just headline. He discovered his gift for oratory quite by accident when he stumbled into meeting of a small party, the NSDAP in Munich. And he suddenly was fired to speak. And he could speak in a way, look I stand to be corrected by any German native speaker here, but he could speak in a way that Germans are just not good at doing. You know, they either adopt a professorial manner, lots and lots of long words and sort of droning on, or they speak like clowns. And Hitler could do both. And he could choose his, there's a trick in German that if you use a Latin word, at a certain point, it can sound rather funny. Whereas if you stick to the German, it's different. Freud used to do this in Kafka as well, alternating, it's untranslatable and I'm not sure I understand it too well myself, but Hitler could speak and people would pay to listen to him. And he could knock out journalistic articles as well, quite well, made quite a bit of money out of it. Now he's leading a job lot of non-entities in the Nazi party. Only Goebbels came close to him in these respects. So he's the party's money and he runs it. And he keeps it together through the 1920s. And it's then, in 1930, given one big present after another. The Versailles system, as it was established in 1919, now Louis was absolutely cockeyed. If you think of the Weimar Republic, set up by the sort of decent Germans who have done a wonderful job with Germany since 1949, set up by people like that, was given a huge war bill to pay in which every German thought the miseries of the country depended on the Allies extracting money, which they didn't. The odd strange thing is, you know, that the European Union has extracted from Germany far more money than ever the reparations bill of 1920 did. And the Germans have paid up like lambs and they're still paying. Now poor old Weimar, it's set up, it's hobbled with all sorts of things. It gets things wrong, of course. The worst thing it did, was again another German weakness, which you can tell from the language, is to be ferociously literal minded. And when in 1919 people said to them, the Americans say you've got to become a democracy. You then find Professor Dr. Poise and various otherworldly saying let's become a democracy. And they have the most literal minded proportional representation, referenda every Saturday afternoon, and so it goes on. In 1932 there were more days of elections than the Reichstag itself actually met, namely 13 against 12. I'll explain if you want later on how this miracle happened. And at the end of it the party which stood most for the Weimar Republic was the Democratic Party. It supported being whittled away by one cause and another. In 1930 it made the usual mistake of liberal parties in saying we must join up with youth. It found a youth party which was not anti-Semitic, joined up with it, sailed into the elections in 1932, got five seats. When in 1933 Hitler said he wanted full powers, they had to vote. And they met beforehand. Two decided to vote for it. Two decided to vote against it. And the other one abstained protesting that the others were splitting the party. And that man, Theodor Hois, subsequently became the president of the Bundesrepublik. Now that is the end of German democracy. Running into this kind of thing, Hitler has got arguments which his opponents are making for him. It's the same when it comes to the arrangements of the Francis Eastern allies. The essential, if you were going to have an Eastern bloc against Germany, was to get the Poles and the Czechs to join. For various reasons they wouldn't. The Poles said our enemy number one is Russia. The Czechs said our enemy number one is Germany. And they quarreled about some tin pot little issue of the town in Silesia. So that Poland joined in in the partition of Czechoslovakia. French defence policy. They tried to cling on to the Rhineland for a bit. Realised they were going to lose it. And then spent a prodigious amount, it was 7000 million francs, on the Maginot Line. Now if you are trying to give the Germans an idea what your strategy is, you build an enormous fortress along the German-French border. The Germans will tell that you're going to have to put a lot of your army there and that you won't attack from it. So they know come through Belgium. It's the greatest white elephant in the whole history of defensive warfare I think is the Maginot Line. Now I could go on in this. Since a lot of you are American and I'm not going to absolve America from blame. You see President Roosevelt would bluster and bluster and would then expect the British to do the actual work. Now when Roosevelt suggested in, was it sometime early 39, that there should be a conference in Avian to look after Europe's Jews. And it went down well in America. So a conference was held and the British said they would take, and we were very generous at that point. The Americans said they would take 10 Jews quarterly in their rears. They were very ungenerous indeed. The country particularly enough was most generous with Santo Domingo. Because President Trujillo said we'll take 100,000 Jews. The reasoning being that they were white. He was busy sterilizing the Haitian workers who came over the border. And the Jews were at least quite, later on he took SS people on the run. People from the Spanish Civil War, anything provided it was white. Now this is, you know, America's not free of its chunk of the blame in all of this. Now I could go on and on. It's not the place to talk about the economics of the 1930s. But Hitler had done remarkably well with full employment after all. And people said, you know, the first reference to a German economic miracle is a Dutch book written in 1936. And not by an housing. So when the British get in the way in 1939, Hitler thinks Providence is on my side and so it proved. Now the British on their side had thought that the French would hold up, they didn't. They got one thing right, that the radar would stop the bombers. The British had put a lot of ingenuity into radar, which somehow escaped the Germans. And radar was decisive in winning the Battle of Britain. Because the fighters didn't need to fly around for 90 minutes, which is all they could fly around for, waiting for bombers. They were told when the bombers came. And in that sense the Battle of Britain, which was a terrific piece of British public relations in America, was a foregone conclusion. You know, you see those German bombers coming over and you think poor salts. And to that extent the anti-churcho people in America are perfectly right, that a British public relations machine of some ingenuity had gone into action to get the Americans on side. Now when England was alone, Britain was alone, again this is a bit of a myth. The British were at the centre of the world empire and largely controlled the seas, and were very good, better than the Germans, at building up an air industry. What they did with it may be another matter. They weren't very good at armies, but they were good at navies and air forces, and it was a world empire. The point at which the British war effort becomes really weak, and it comes as no surprise is the involvement in the Far East in Singapore. That was crazy to get involved in Singapore when you were trying to hold on in your home islands. People said to Churchill, this is a mistake. And it was I think his worst mistake was to try to hang on for the sake of India to Singapore, because that really drained the empire's resources. I'd better leave this subject because I'm watching the clock, and come back to, should we say wars develop their own momentum, we all know that. Hitler's main decision was to attack Russia. Now the Allies won. Could they have won in 1943? Is a good question. But I'll try for the rest of my time to ask, how did people perceive their experiences in the war? Now there's a good, very good case for arguing that the British got it completely wrong. They thought that the man in Whitehall knows best. We got the first of the great European welfare states. I would have to say, is there a single bit of it that anybody else has imitated, and if there's a single bit of it that we wouldn't now want to dismantle and start again with. A lot of that goes back to the experience of the Second World War, when we thought national solidarity. Now national solidarity came to depend in 1943 on American machine tools and a lot of American examples and of course force coming in. A lot depended on that. At the end of the war the British still thought we're a great power and the attempt to become a great power meant that we made all sorts of mistakes building up a sterling area which was out of date quite quickly, building up more foreign investment in the empire than had existed in 1914, largely at America's expense. That should have been spent at home as anybody who has experienced the London Tube nowadays knows. All sorts of mistakes. It was an illusion of the victory I think were greater in 1945 than they were in 1919. Russia I won't say too much about because, but the myth got about that Stalin had defeated Hitler where the Kaiser had defeated the Tsar. In other words the old Russia was a sort of muck of peasants which needed Stalinism to modernize. Russia was left with that until Gorby came along and the strain of maintaining a world power status on the basis of a very weak economy and a collapsing demoralized society meant the country was a mess and to some extent it still is and to that extent I've got some sympathy with Mr. Putin rather than Yeltsin. And the third one is America. America, you know if you were American in 1945 it's such a lovely world. Do you remember Annie Get Your Gun and Hollywood Conquers the World? The American GIs were loved wherever they went. America seemed to be the great miracle country and it looked up to by pretty well anywhere that was civilized. Now a big success was made of Germany and Japan in the end. After about six, seven years they got Japan right. After about three or four Germany. A big success has been made by the way in Turkey. The involvement of Turkey in NATO and with America has been very beneficial indeed. Not often shouted about but it has been. Now does this idea go to the heads of Kennedy and subsequently with getting involved in places like Vietnam? There's a wonderful scene in some book I read about it where they decided to have a constitution for Vietnam and it, they assembled the usual political scientist led by Samuel Huntington and as with Viet Cong bombs exploding under bridges or off bicycles there's Sam Huntington busy devising article 187 clause 15 relating to the rights of women of the Vietnamese constitution. Then we come on to episodes like Iraq which I'm afraid I supported Afghanistan and now Syria. The idea that an American intervention is going to be a 1945 again is surely one of the illusions that we owe to the Second World War. Finally one country or two which did learn Germany and Austria. Germany is now, if any Scotsman, Englishman goes to Germany you think readable press, an infrastructure that works, no rock music, no orfs wandering around clutching their genitals and howling. Nothing of this sort, hugely civilised place, how's it possible? Now the German system is a bit stodgy, yes. Angela Merkel is clearly not, does not have the rhetorical force of the great Margaret Thatcher but it works and Germany's influence has been good. As it happens the frontiers of modern Europe are more or less the frontiers established at Brezlatovsk in 1918. There is a Ukraine, there is a Georgia and so forth. The German influence in Eastern Europe is wholly positive. I can't see anything wrong with it. I remember Margaret Thatcher said to me once, what did I think about German unification? Was it going to be the Fourth Reich? I said no, not at all. West Germany will take over East Germany and we'll get the equivalent of 12 Liverpool's. I suppose for you it might be Baltimore. That's how it worked out. That's how it worked out. Things wrong with Germany but still the model country. You have to ask, I'm afraid, given where I started. Was this the effect of the Allied bombs? You know, we have not had a cheap of serious German nationalism since 1945, not a cheap. Is it the victory in the end of the good Germans? Or is it just that Sodom and Gomorrah was the fate of that country in 1944-45? I'm not sure. Thank you.