Charles C. W. Cooke

@charlescwcooke · Twitter · 2025-07-06 11:19 UTC

Where to start? The leaflet referred to here—“A Last Appeal to Reason,” by Adolf Hitler—was dropped en masse on August 1, 1940. By that date: 1) Nazi Germany’s attempt to destroy the Royal Air Force ahead of an invasion of Britain was already in its fourth week (on July 10, 1940, 21 days before the leaflets, 120 Luftwaffe bombers hit British ships in the channel, and 70 Luftwaffe bombers struck dockyards in Wales—from that date on, raids were staged by the Luftwaffe every day and night); 2) Hitler had already issued Directive No. 16 (July 16), which formalized plans for the imminent invasion of Britain (Operation Sealion); and 3) Nazi Germany had already conquered France, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, and had begun (in July 1940) to make plans to invade the Soviet Union—with which it had signed a non-aggression pact!—and to murder tens of millions of its supposedly subhuman people (see: Himmler’s memo of 25 May 1940). Cooper’s causation is false, too. Five weeks after the leaflet was dropped, Nazi Germany started bombing London and other British cities in a campaign known as the “Blitz.” But this did not happen because, to his great regret, Hitler’s friendly little leaflet campaign had failed; it happened because, by that point, Hitler had realized that Nazi Germany was losing the Battle of Britain, that the air superiority he needed prior to an invasion was going to elude him, and that a new tactic was necessary. In a sense, the Blitz was an updated leaflet campaign: the purpose was to turn the British against the war and leave Nazi Germany with a free hand to do more of what it had done since 1937. As for the idea that Churchill magically had all the leaflets collected? The Nazis dropped five million of them, in literally every part of the country. So, while efforts were indeed made in cities to clean up, and the British government, indeed, didn’t like it, hiding them all wasn’t remotely feasible—or even attempted in earnest. Even in the 1990s, when I was a kid, there were so many of them in circulation that you’d see them at garage sales and antique shops, and old people would go get them from their attics to show them off. To cast Hitler as Cooper does here—and, by extension, Churchill—you have to ignore that, when this leaflet was dropped, Nazi Germany had taken over pretty much all of Western Europe, and was in the process of attempting to destroy Britain’s air defenses so that, in Hitler’s own words of July 16, Germany could “eliminate the English homeland as a base for the prosecution of the war against Germany and, if necessary, to occupy it completely.” If you are able to read those words and buy their implication that Germany was merely acting defensively, then you’re a total bloody moron. https://x.com/martyrmade/status/1941526571279581496?s=46