The Village That Died for England: Tyneham and the Legend of Churchill's Pledge by Patrick Wright

Author:Patrick Wright [Wright, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, Modern, 20th Century, Europe, Great Britain, General, Social Science, sociology
ISBN: 9781913462536
Google: ZxQPEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Watkins Media Limited
Published: 2021-09-14T23:22:43.834970+00:00

On Gauleiters, Swastikas and the “Teutonic” Nature of Fir Trees

Did Gardiner really wish to be the Gauleiter of Wessex as local gossip still suggests? Somewhat chastened by hindsight, he would describe the vision he had shared with the Deutsch Freischar as a kind of “Regional Socialism” that would have avoided the centralised “Mass State” common to Nazism and communism. He conceded that this system would still have demanded an “all-powerful and protective central Authority” to “displace the parliament of warring parties”, wrest control of economic factors out of the hands of private interests and restore individual personal freedom within a secure state.71 As the war proceeded, Gardiner retreated into a Royalist English variation on this still fascist theme. Like Lymington, he concluded that the land, far from being nationalised by the state, should be vested in the Crown; and that regional committees should be set up with the power to “confiscate” the land of owners who were too decadent to act as responsible “trustees” and to pioneer the rural revival that would come through mutual aid.72 The King would appoint “regional commissioners” from among the landowners or farmers. They should not be elders but rather men in the “prime of life” — matured youth leaders perhaps — and they should travel around their region “mercilessly castigating every sort of bumbledom and red-tape, overlapping and compartmentalism, making government once more a direct, forcible and kindly benediction instead of an abstract curse”. Gardiner suggested that these commissioners might be called Dukes.

It is conceivable that, as an ecological Royalist, Gardiner might himself have been available for such office, yet this is not to say that he was ever exactly a gauleiter in waiting. As he wrote,

In what way would such a Duke differ from a ‘gauleiter’? Surely in every way. A ‘gauleiter’ is the nominee of a dictatorial party which has captured the stronghold of the state; the Duke would be the personal appointment of the King, but he could be acclaimed or rejected by the total electorate of his region through a plebiscite held after his nomination and subsequently every three, five or seven years. This method of appointment from above and acclamation or rejection from below, is a very old device with good precedents in Anglo-Saxon history. It avoids completely the party flavour and demagogy of electoral methods, and at the same time safeguards the realm from the King’s favourites.

While others worried more about the bombed and murdered people, Gardiner was dismayed to see the Nazi war machine turn even trees to its own twisted and metallic ends. Writing about forestry in the last years of the war, he opened with the image of Hitler’s army advancing on Russia, and the “rediscovery of wood” that fuelled it.73 Wood derivatives fuelled and greased the trucks. The tyres were made from wood alcohol, and the explosives came from waste products of pulp mills. Plywood planes assisted, and even the propaganda films were made of wood cellulose acetate. This was, he said, “a colossal

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