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WW2 Pod: We Have Ways of Making You Talk
Winston Churchill, Dominic Sandbrook, & Philippe Sands
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- [00:02]
Al Murray
Thank you for listening to we have ways of making you talk Sign up to our Patreon to receive bonus content, live streams and our weekly newsletter with money off books and museum visits as well. Plus early access to all live show tickets. That's patreon.com wehaveways. Hello there, it's Al Murray here, CO host of WW2 pod. We have ways of making you talk for all your Second World War needs. Now, do you want a sample of the amazing history talks that we have on offer this September at we have ways Fest 6? Perhaps you even came to the festival last year, but you couldn't get to every talk you wanted to hear. It is an enormous FOMO trap. Well, here at We Haveways HQ we are hard at work putting up all the past talks on our Patreon page in a collection just for our subscribers. We've just uploaded an amazing array of talks from 2025's headquarters tent with some of the world's most engaging historians on topics as diverse as Japan, aviation and the family stories submitted by you, our listeners. A highlight of the festival. For me, now is a great time to subscribe and get loads of extra content you can enjoy. Ad free listening why not? Priority access to new series and ticketed events. Regular live streams where you can watch me and Jim War Waffle on your screen at home. A weekly newsletter with book and modeling discounts. That's right, scale modeling and bonus episodes. All that and more at patreon.com we haveways patreon.com we haveways. Now as a taster, we've prepared an extract from two of the talks we've just uploaded. Listen as Dominic Sandbrook and Tim Shipman debate if Winston Churchill was the greatest Britain. And also a a fascinating talk from Philippe Sands hunting Nazis in South America. Enjoy.
- [02:02]
Dominic Sandbrook
I think he is the greatest Briton and I don't mean that he's the best or I don't mean he's the one who always made the most considered decisions. And I don't mean by that that Churchill is perfect. So the poll that was done, the Greatest Britain's poll in 2002, when you look at the the names in that kind of top 10. So you mentioned Brunel, that Clarkson was promoting Horatio Nelson, Elizabeth I and so on. They're all complicated characters with dark as well as light. That's certainly true of Churchill, but I think Churchill does a couple of things. Clearly Churchill stands for something bigger than himself, which is the story of British resistance in the world wars. I think Churchill also has become a kind of. Because of his shape, because of the look and the sound of him. He's a brilliant avatar for Britishness, the kind of bulldog spirit and all of this kind of thing. But, you know, when we did a series on the Rest Is History about young Churchill, what was so striking for me, reading his book, My Early Life, and telling the story of him at Harrow and in South Africa and all of this stuff that was the remarkable humanity of the man. Everything is in Technicolor, everything is larger than life. He's extremely funny, he's complicated and sometimes he's difficult, but he's often extremely generous. He's endlessly curious. I mean, this is one of the amazing things about Churchill. When he was a very young man and he was sent out to India, he decided to kind of educate himself by reading all the great books and he wrote afterwards, he was delighted for the first time to open Plato's Republic. And he said, you know, there's lots of good stuff in here, and most of it I've actually thought of myself already. And I think, you know, especially so for those of you who haven't read Churchill's book, My Early Life, which is one of the first books he wrote. It's a really funny, enjoyable read. And that's not necessarily true of a lot of politicians books. You're probably the only person here who's read Liz Truss's memoir, I think, Every Last Word. Yeah, yeah. Now, most politicians memoirs, are. They. You sense the sort of pomposity or the vanity or whatever. With Churchill, of course, there's a bit of vanity, but there's a tremendous sort of an irony, a sense of irony about himself and his own Persona that makes him infectious. So in terms of the characters of British history, I think he's clearly up there as one of the most richly enjoyable, but also precisely because he stands for what's become really a defining modern myth, which is standing alone against the Nazis, Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain and so on. I think that puts him in a different league. And I think the only people that really compete with him are your Nelsons, Elizabeth I, Alfred the Great, maybe there are one or two others, but in terms of elected politicians, I think he probably stands alone.
- [05:03]
Tim Shipman
Yeah, he's not our best prime minister, but he's our greatest prime minister. That's how I would put it. He may not even be our best war leader, but he's. The whole picture is just amazing. You talk about the myths of, you know, 1940 and all the rest of it, but he was A constant myth creator, wasn't he? He was kind of very conscious of creating his own myths and, and where he emerged from this sort of Edwardian kind of world where, you know, big ideas and, you know, big things, you know, Britain was running the world and it kind of cared about that stuff.
- [05:34]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, he did, absolutely. I mean, just tell us about that,
- [05:37]
Tim Shipman
tell us about, you know, was Churchill always going to be this kind of character? Is he a man of his time in that sense?
- [05:43]
Dominic Sandbrook
It's a good question. I think so. He has a sort of a sense that a lot of great politicians have of being a performer on a stage, everybody looking at him and wanting to measure up, kind of diva quality. What does he say? Famously, we're all worms, but I believe that I'm a glow worm. And he sort of always tried to live up to that for me. Actually, one of the remarkable things about Churchill is that if you look at his boyhood, his background, so he's the son of Lord Randolph Churchill and Jenny Jerome, who are terrible parents. Lord Randolph is literally driven mad, possibly by sexually transmitted disease. Jenny Jerome is a monstrous person. An American heiress who marries Lord Randolph. They basically pack Winston off to prep school and then to Harrow. He's often, you know, there are stories he's not allowed to come home at Christmas, for example, because it will interfere with his mother's affair with an Austrian diplomat. We have letters from him to his mother and father begging them to come and visit him in Harrow. And they don't come. They in fact write it back to him and say, stop sniveling, you brat. You know, you're so wet. You're such a failure. Leave us alone.
- [06:59]
Tim Shipman
Yeah, there's loads of good stuff in the Andrew Roberts book.
- [07:02]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, the Andrew Roberts book is brilliant on this and it's actually very moving and you can see how with a different kind of character, Churchill would have had a tremendous sense of. He could have been a self pitying sort of victimhood, all of this stuff. But actually there's an internal jollity to him, a zest for life, a jauntiness and I think that propels him, but
- [07:23]
Tim Shipman
also a sense of destiny, isn't there?
- [07:24]
Dominic Sandbrook
A sense of destiny? There's a wonderful story about him after, I think, Evensong at Harrow with another boy and they went downstairs and they were chatting and this boy said to him, what do you think you do when you grow up? And Churchill. And Churchill said, oh, you know. And this boy said, well, I'll be probably a diplomat like my father or maybe a Businessman And Churchill said, you know, he sort of looked misty eyed into the middle distance and said, one day London will be under attack and it will fall to me to save London and the empire and all of this. That's just how he spoke when he was 14. And. So I think you have to have the stage as well as the actor, and the stage is really important. It's so obviously when Churchill is born in 1874, Britain is top nation. You know, Britain does bestride the world like a colossus. And that means that in the, you know, the 1890s, for example, when he's a young man and he wants to cut his teeth, he's given these wonderfully exotic backgrounds against which to do it. The northwest frontier, he goes to watch the Americans fighting in Cuba. He famously goes to South Africa as a war correspondent. You know, this amazing story of going to South Africa. The sort of the train is attacked by the Burs. This shootout on the train where he takes command, he's taken prisoner and then escapes from prison, is the most wanted man in the Boer War, escapes by hiding down a mine that just happens to be run by somebody who's sympathetic to the British cause. There's then getting onto another train that takes him to salvation in Mozambique. So if any of you have seen the young Churchill film, you remember the scene when he escapes and then the train crosses the border and he's kind of shouting in the air for joy. I mean, this is all true. He mythologized it, of course, and turned it into great newspaper copy and then, you know, books and then the genesis of his political career. But it happened. And it wouldn't have happened had he not had the extraordinary good fortune to be born at a point where Britain's world power gave him that possibility. And then I think the cause of the empire and of what he saw as Britain's great destiny, its adventure, its glory, that's what he stood for more than anything else. So when he changes parties, conservative to liberal and then constitutionalist and then back to conservative again, national government and so on, you know, Churchill is very hard to pin down politically, but the one thing that runs through his life and career like a thread is that commitment to the empire and empire. I think not in terms of. I think a lot of people get this wrong when they talk about church and empire. I don't think he thinks of it in terms of oppression and subjugation. He thinks of it in terms of sort of technicolor adventures, excitement, exoticism and glory. And of course he sees the colonial peoples. Often he doesn't give them agency and he sees them merely as supporting characters in a drama in which he and people like him, other public schoolboys will always have the leading roles. But I don't think it's an inhuman way of thinking about the world because
- [10:47]
Tim Shipman
this is the grief he gets these days. Of course, he's cancelled all the time. You know, people chuck things over his statue outside my office. It's, you know, there's a generational kind of thing here, isn't there, with Churchill? People have sort of older than us, remember the Empire stuff. People of about our age grew up watching war films and sort of eulogized him for 1940. But it's quite. It's harder to connect him to sort of people under 40 who didn't grow up watching Where Eagles Dare. I mean, why not? I don't understand personally, but.
- [11:21]
Dominic Sandbrook
Yeah, but I think some of this is unfair, actually.
- [11:24]
Tim Shipman
Yeah.
- [11:24]
Dominic Sandbrook
So there are very few public figures of Church's generation about whom we know more.
- [11:32]
Tim Shipman
Yeah.
- [11:33]
Dominic Sandbrook
So almost everything. You know, when Churchill came to your house for dinner or when you met him, it was a great moment because he's an exciting personality and he says very provocative, outspoken and often outrageous things. And so people would make a note of them and often Churchill would be showing off, he would be trying to shock. So he would say, you know, things to sort of dinner parties of Edwardian liberals or something about Indians. And I think he would be doing it often deliberately to needle the more bien Ponson members of the company these days.
- [12:09]
Tim Shipman
He'd be writing a column in the Spectator. Like Roblox.
- [12:11]
Dominic Sandbrook
Exactly. Well, I mean, we all know columnists who specialize in this. I'm not averse to doing it myself, quite frankly. And I think one of the most
- [12:24]
Tim Shipman
read things, by the way, on the Spectator website in recent weeks was Dominic's claim that we fought on the wrong side in the First World War. The headline may have gone slightly further than the copy.
- [12:39]
Dominic Sandbrook
No, no, the headline did not go far enough. We should have fought against terrorists and regicides. We should have if we had our ancestral enemies. Obviously everyone in this room knows this. They're our friends and neighbors across the Channel. This was the chance. Finish them off once and for all. Who doesn't like who? Who doesn't like a Habsburg era cafe? Who doesn't like a nice evening with the Kaiser? What's wrong with you, Tim?
- [13:17]
Tim Shipman
And when you finish with the quiz tonight, take up arms and let's retake Calais.
- [13:27]
Philippe Sands
How did this book begin? There are Many starting points. But basically I think the real starting point is the summer of 2014. I'm in a small village in Austria called Hagenberg, the home of Horst Wachter. You will know Horst if you listen to the BBC series the Ratline or the book. He is the son of Otto and Charlotte Wachter. Otto Wachter, a major Nazi governor in German occupied Poland, based in the city of Lviv, hunted after the war for the murder of hundreds of thousands of Poles and Jews and Roma. In fact, I've just been talking to the guy who runs SOE Expeditions here, explaining how I followed in his tracks over the Dolomites and made my way from Innsbruck to Bolzano on exactly the route he had taken in 1949. And I think he wants to now do an expedition. And I said, yes, yes, I will take that expedition. It'll be brilliant, brilliant thing to do. 1200 meters to 3000 meters in the space of two days. And it's beautiful, it's an extraordinary place. So Horst Vechter, the son of Otto and Charlotte, says to me one day, you know, my family have an archive. My parents kept all of their letters and all of their diaries and all of their photographs and all of their recordings and all of their everything. Would you like to have access to it? Yes. Is the Pope Catholic? Yes, yes, I would like to have access to it. So he says, come, come to my Schloss, my castle, very dilapidated. He loves visitors, incidentally. And if any of you were to write to him and say, we would love to visit your Schloss, he would actually invite you to visit and he would take you to the part of the attic which is dedicated to the Nazi period and you will find his parents books and diaries and letters and so on and so forth. He gives me access to everything. I use the material to write the Ratline. The most extensive diaries and private archive of any senior Nazi that has ever been found. It's now publicly available and searchable on the website of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Just type in Wachter archive and you can just read the documents for yourselves, mostly in German, but they're there. In the middle of the archive I come across a letter, three pages, typed, single space, sent to Otto Wachter who is residing at that time in Rome in a Vatican run monastery on the Raden. From the British, the Americans, the Soviets and anyone who's out to capture him and put him on trial for mass murder. And the letter is sent from Damascus, Syria and it says, to Otto Wachter, it actually refers to him as Lieber Herr Reinhard because he used a pseudonym. Reinhard describes life in Damascus and basically says, don't come to Syria, don't escape to the Arab world. It's not a good place for Germans and Austrians head either to South Africa or to South America. Wachter dies three months later in mysterious circumstances in the Vatican hospital in Rome. And he doesn't follow the Ratline to South America. But I get interested in who the writer of the letter is. It's a gentleman called Walter Ralph. Who is Walter Ralph? In 2014, the name rang no bells, but in fact, I would later be pointed out, learn that I did know the name Walter Ralph. He appears in a book that was a sort of cult book when I was a student in the early 1980s by Great British travel writer called Bruce Chatwin. And many of you may have. Some of you may have read In Patagonia. And if you've got a copy of In Patagonia, go to chapter 96, it's very short and it's devoted to Walter Ralph. We'll come back to that chapter in due course. So I see the name Walter Ralph as the signatory of this letter to Wachter. I Google him. What do I learn? He had been in the German Navy in the 1930s. He was discharged for adultery and he then joins the SS in 1937. And he works in the same office as Adolf Eichmann, Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich and so on and so forth. Then in 1941, he is given a special mission by Himmler and Heydrich to design and operate a series of mobile gas vans, small vans that are fitted to hold up to 50 individuals who will be then driven in them to a location and gassed to death on an industrial scale. It's the sort of precursor to Belzech, Treblinka, Auschwitz and the extermination camps, using gas, killing 3, 400 people. And it operates for two years until they replace the vans with the large industrial complexes for killing on an even more efficient and industrial scale. And Ralph is charged with operating those gas vans which kill somewhere between 600,000 and 900,000 people in the space of about a year. And the details are pretty well known. He then, after that is over, heads to North Africa, where he becomes the SS man in charge of Tunisia until the British retake what is now Tunisia. He's only there for eight or nine months and he's then posted in Milan to head the Gestapo offices in that city and in that part of Italy. Where he engages in further mass killing of Italian partisans, Communists, leftists, Jews and other political opponents of Nazism and Italian fascism. I've spent a lot of time in Milan on his trail. His name is still known today in Milan, and the building that he operated out of there is a plaque which indicates that it was his office right by the La Scala opera house in Milan. So, very notorious figure. He's caught by the British in. In 1945 and is imprisoned. He escapes and he makes his way to Syria, Damascus, where he heads up a sort of Gestapo operation for the Syrian secret service. He's then thrown out of Syria and he decides he'll follow his own advice that he's given to Vechter and head to South America. So he flees with his wife Edith and his two young sons, and they make their way first to Italy and Genoa, and they then sail from Genoa to South America. And they fetch up in the small South American country of Ecuador and live in the the capital city of Quito. His first job, unbelievably for the guy who designed and operated the mobile gas vans under the Nazi regime, is as a motor mechanic for the Mercedes Benz concession in Quito, Ecuador. You couldn't invent these kinds of stories. Life is fantastic. And they make their life there and they expect to stay there indefinitely. Except that in 1956 they meet an absolutely charming, delightful Chilean couple who say to the Ralphs, frankly, you're in the wrong country. You should be in our country, Chile, big German community. We love people like you. And so the Ralphs leave and they head for Chile, make a new life. One son enters the army military academy, another son enters the naval academy, and they become military officers. And the parents set up shop in the most southern town in the whole world. It's called Punta Arenas. Has anyone here been to Punta Arenas? Okay, so you'll know it's sort of an amazing place. It really is worth going. If any of you have a chance to go to Patagonia, it's on the Chilean side. You really feel you are at the end of the world. And I think one of the reasons he chose Puntarenas was that he felt incredibly safe there. He becomes the manager of a king crab cannery. If you've been to Puntarenas, you will undoubtedly have eaten something called centoja. They are these literally giant crabs. They're as big as this, with their tentacles. They are huge, and there's millions of them around. And there was a fishery called the Peschera Camellio. And he becomes the manager of The Peschera Camellia. And in writing the book, I come to know a lot of the ladies who worked under his sort of directorship. They're now in their 80s, but they remember him very well. They were 16, 17 years old. And they describe graphically how Ralph would operate. They said he was a very good manager. He had a filthy temper, got very angry sometimes, but he treated them well and respectfully. The tins of crab meat would come down the processing line ready to be exported to Europe and other parts of the world. And sometimes there'd be bits dangling over the edges of the tin cans. And one of the ladies, Maria, explained to me how he would come up to the tin can and he would show them very delicately how you took the leg, you put it over, you took the leg over, you patted it all down. And she would turn to me and say, of course, he had experience to doing these kinds of things. They all knew his background. And this is one of the great mysteries, how people could live in that context with someone with that background.
- [24:59]
Al Murray
Well, that was fantastic, wasn't it? Nothing really beats listening to experts with an audience as well. There's something about the audience that gets the juices flowing. Really brilliant to hear people at the top of the game talking about the things they're interested in. And, of course, some robust opinion from Mr. Sambrook of the Shire. Right, well, if you want to hear the rest of these talks, as well as hours of other exclusive member content, subscribe now@patreon.com we haveways. That's patreon.com we haveways. We'll see you there. On the other side of the subscription,