France becomes an island
Sir: A quotation from Marc Ullmann's excellent article 'France becomes an island' (15 December): 'One British official said . . . that Britain fought in 1940 not because of the Nazi concentration camps (whose existence was largely unknown) but because she could not accept a European order from which she was excluded.' My italics. Capitals if you prefer. I see this official as an ass.
I also see him as a mischievous ass establishing a myth. I have seen this kind of thing frequently in the last ten years in the press and sometimes in " books. (Vide Charlie Chaplin's autobiography, Penguin, p. 387.) I myself knew all that one needed to know about concentration camps from 1933 onwards. My in- valuable sources of information were in the press, the big national dailies chiefly, and the London Evening Standard and Evening News, Reliable reports of atrocity made me, anti-Nazi and made me keen to join the army in the war, not some theory about British relations with the continent. If this bone-headed official is to be believed, my case was not typical of millions but of a tiny minority with access to newspaper reports: the battle of Britain was fought and won, the nation rallied to Winston, not because of any horror of the nature of Nazi rule, but through devotion to the doctrines of the late Sir Eyre Crowe.
Germans have been criticised, pot least in their own country, for pretending ignorance of Nazi crimes. At least they have the excuse that con- centration camps and such-like monstrosities were not reported in the German press. They were reported—very fully and sensationally reported— over and over again in the British, French and American press. Will Mr Ullmann please work for this British official's recall? Will you, sir, do your utmost to stop a mischievously foolish myth from being popularly accepted as history?
Christopher Sykes Shute House, Donhead St Mary, Near Shaftesbury, Dorset
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