Christopher Hale – författare

In 1938, on the eve of war, a Nazi expedition set out through British India on a mission sponsored by Himmler himself. Its aim was to trace the origins of the Aryan race, high in the sacred mountains of Tibet. The expedition was led by two complex individuals - Ernst Schäfer, a swashbuckling, gun-toting naturalist for whom Nazism promised a short-cut to personal glory, and Bruno Beger, an anthropologist whose racial theories were taken to their logical conclusion in Auschwitz.Schäfer and Beger soon found themselves battling hostility from the British, being manipulated by the Tibetans and struggling with the primitive conditions in the holy city of Lhasa. Every detail of the expedition was recorded in diaries, letters and secret reports. It was also documented in thousands of extraordinary photographs (some of which are reproduced here for the first time in decades) and on film.Despite this abundant documentation, the full story of Schäfer's ill-fated expedition has never been told. This encounter between the British and the Nazis so close to the Second World War forms a 'picture in little' of the conflict to come. HIMMLER'S CRUSADE explores the ideological roots of the Nazis' obsession with racial theory and the occult. Using the wealth of primary material as well as his own interviews with Bruno Beger, Christopher Hale has written a fascinating and thought-provoking book that brilliantly evokes this little-known prelude to the unimaginable horror of war.

‘I suppose you know who I am? I was in charge of the actions in Germany and Poland and Czechoslovakia. I am prepared to sell you one million Jews: Goods for blood … Blood for goods.’ These were the chilling words uttered by one of the most notorious Nazi bureaucrats, SS Colonel Adolf Eichmann, to a young Jewish businessman called Joel Brand in the spring of 1944. Brand embarked on a desperate mission to persuade the Allies to barter with Eichmann – and failed. At the same time, the SS deported hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau packed in cattle trains. The majority were gassed, then incinerated. For decades after 1945, many blamed the Allies for callously abandoning a million Hungarian Jews to their fate. In Deception, Christopher Hale presents a new account of the ‘Brand Mission’ based on evidence in the national archives of Germany, Hungary, Britain and the United States. Hale reveals that Eichmann’s offer formed one part of a monstrous deception designed to outwit the leaders of the last surviving Jewish community in Europe. The deception was more complex and – from the German point of view – more successful than any operation mounted by the secret services of the Allied governments.

The Malayan Emergency (1948–60) was the longest war waged by British and Commonwealth forces in the twentieth century. Fought against communist guerrillas in the jungles of Malaya, this undeclared ‘war without a name’ had a powerful and covert influence on American strategy in Vietnam. Many military historians still consider the Emergency an exemplary, even inspiring, counterinsurgency conflict. Massacre in Malaya draws on recently released files from British archives, as well as eyewitness accounts from both the government forces and communist fighters, to challenge this view. It focuses on the notorious ‘Batang Kali Massacre’ – known as ‘Britain’s My Lai’ – that took place in December, 1948, and reveals that British tactics in Malaya were more ruthless than many historians concede.Counterinsurgency in Malaya, as in Kenya during the same period, depended on massive resettlement programmes and ethnic cleansing, indiscriminate aerial bombing and ruthless exploitation of aboriginal peoples, the Orang Asli. The Emergency was a discriminatory war. In Malaya, the British built a brutal and pervasive security state – and bequeathed it to modern Malaysia. The ‘Malayan Emergency’ was a bitterly fought war that still haunts the present.

The fascinating account of two former British colonies with a shared past but vastly different identities today!Singapore and Malaysia sit astride the sea lanes linking East with West—vital choke points in the world's commerce. Since ancient times, ports along the Silk Road of the Sea were populated by peoples from around the globe who came here to trade and live, carried by the steady flow of goods and the ever-present monsoon winds.Author Christopher Hale recounts many fascinating histories of this region, including:The ancient international trade in spices and the seven voyages to the southern seas of the Chinese eunuch Admiral Zheng He in the 15th centuryThe rise of Islamic kingdoms along rivers bordering the Straits of Malacca and the conquest of Malacca, one of the world's largest cities, by a few hundred Portuguese marauders in 1511The saga of Sir Stamford Raffles, credited with founding Singapore, and the development of tin mines and vast rubber and oil palm plantations on the Malay PeninsulaThe disastrous fall of "Fortress Singapore" to the Japanese in World War II after only three weeks of fighting, the worst British military defeat in historyThe wildly successful film Crazy Rich Asians, set in Singapore, the highest grossing romantic comedy of the decadeA Brief History of Singapore and Malaysia tells these and many other compelling stories about the people and events which have shaped these nations as they developed into modern powerhouses of international trade and tourism.

In Hitler’s Foreign Executioners, Heinrich Himmler’s secret master plan for Europe is revealed: an SS empire that would have no place for either the Nazi Party or Adolf Hitler. His astonishingly ambitious plan depended on the recruitment of tens of thousands of ‘Germanic’ peoples from every corner of Europe, and even parts of Asia, to build an ‘SS Europa’. This revised and fully updated book, researched in archives all over Europe and using first-hand testimony, exposes Europe’s dirty secret: nearly half a million Europeans and more than a million Soviet citizens enlisted in the armed forces of the Third Reich to fight a deadly crusade against a mythic foe, Jewish Bolshevism.Even today, some apologists claim that these foreign SS volunteers were merely soldiers ‘like any other’ and fought a decent war against Stalin’s Red Army. Historian Christopher Hale demonstrates conclusively that these surprisingly common views are mistaken. By taking part in Himmler’s murderous master plan, these foreign executioners hoped to prove that they were worthy of joining his future ‘SS Europa’. But as the Reich collapsed in 1944, Himmler’s monstrous scheme led to bitter confrontations with Hitler – and to the downfall of the man once known as ‘loyal Heinrich’.

The fascinating story of Labour’s efforts to feed post-war Britain by leveraging its African colonies—and the enduring political consequences of the Scheme’s failure.Britain in 1946 was a bruised and miserable nation. Despite its victory in World War Two, it had emerged disillusioned, hard up and chronically short of food and edible oils. The new Labour government had won a decisive mandate, but had so far failed to deliver its promised ‘New Jerusalem’. Desperate to restore morale, it devised an audacious solution to Britain’s post-war scarcity: the East African Groundnut Scheme.Thousands of volunteers would clear Yorkshire-sized tracts of Tanganyikan bush to grow oil-rich groundnuts. Labour championed this crusade with messianic zeal, convinced that British ingenuity could transform its colonies into agricultural powerhouses. But despite massive investment, the Scheme collapsed spectacularly, having failed to conduct adequate research and having disregarded local knowledge. Conservatives and tabloids buried it beneath ridicule, with ‘groundnuts’ becoming a byword for left-wing incompetence and economic bungling. The fallout would contribute to Labour’s 1951 electoral defeat. But was it truly a government blunder?Christopher Hale reveals a more complex story. The United Africa Company (a subsidiary of Anglo-Dutch giant Unilever) sold the Scheme to fraught ministers, then catastrophically mismanaged operations. The real scandal wasn’t socialism gone wrong—it was the betrayal of a nation’s hopes by a corporate behemoth.