“The lifting of the Siege of Singapore in the summer of 1943, after more than a year of constant attack from the air and sea, was surely the turning point in the Asia-Pacific War as far as Britain was concerned. November’s Operation Stuart, landing British and Australian troops on the Malay Peninsula all along the Andaman coast, had been a slow and difficult process but a series of actions by the Royal Navy, its capital ships free to operate in the Pacific since the destruction of the German surface fleet in 1940, had ensured Japanese naval interference could only do so much. By the time Kuantan on the opposite side of the peninsula had fallen it was clear that the liberation of Singapore, whose defenders were mostly comprised of Indians – a fact shamefully whitewashed in the 2015 Abigail Sutcliffe film Singapore – was approaching. The famous Malacca Express, which had seen some of the bravest men in the world navigate supply ships through the Straits of Malacca under constant threat of bombardment, was now becoming more of a pleasure cruise than a daily dance with death as Japanese aircraft ceased to appear in the sky. Indeed, the Japanese government was fundamentally altering its security outlook. The concept of the Inner Circle had taken root regarding the sphere of the Empire of Japan; as the islands of the East Indies fell to the Commonwealth while the United States continued its island hopping campaign in the Pacific – U.S. Marines were landing at Guadalcanal on the same day that Singapore was relieved, beginning the reversal of the Midway shame – Japan began to define a new defensive perimeter. Tokyo saw which way the wind was blowing; soon the Allies would surely reach the Home Islands, and Japan couldn’t overstretch herself. And so the assault on Singapore was suddenly abandoned; one day its defenders awoke to realise they had overslept, as no Japanese aircraft had emerged to be their regular alarm clock. Days later a Major Eric Wedgewood, who before the war had been renovating Morecambe pier, strolled out of the forest leading the first units of the liberation. Greeting an Indian unit that approached to welcome them, he shook its colonel’s hand and said, ‘Hullo, I’m Major Wedgewood. Sorry we took a while.’”
- B. Gonzalez, In the Doldrums: The East Indies Wartime Experience, p.59.
“With no major fighting on European soil for nearly five years, the Reich had plenty of time to indulge in its most repulsive desires. Europe had been conquered, but it was what came after that proved most monstrous. The systematic murder of every Jewish man, woman, and child had occupied some part of Hitler’s damaged mind for a debatable amount of time but it gained form shortly after the final fall of North Africa to the British in the April of 1941. His belief that a final stalemate was now ensuing gave birth to the ‘purification memo.’ On one sheet of paper, dated May 5th, 1941 the Fuhrur advised Himmler that ‘the purification of Europe must commence forthwith.’ Thus what the Nazis called the Purification began. The industrial slaughter of the Jews, along with many other minority groups deemed undesirable, was the culmination of the intellectual madness which Germany had collapsed into. The Danish island of Bornholm, surrounded by the Baltic, was selected to be the eventual nexus of this supreme effort of genocide. Its entire population evacuated to mainland Denmark, Bornholm was renamed to its Old Norse name Burgundaholmr and annexed into Germany. The whole island would become one vast zone of death; at Vestermarie, a short drive from the port from which countless prisoners disembarked, three million people eventually perished. Other camps dotted across Poland – Zelechow, Kolbuszowa, and of course Auschwitz were the most infamous – killed another three million more as did widespread mass killings by Nazi death squads. So comprehensive was the killing that by the end of the war there were scarcely any Jews left in France, the Low Countries, Denmark, Germany, Poland, or Romania. Italy handed over her Jews to win favour with Germany after losing North Africa. The first post-war census in France recorded only 4,560; in 1933, there had been 235,000. The German ground forces that weren’t engaged in the Turkish attrition often found themselves assigned to ‘Jew duty.’ By 1945 only a handful had survived the camps, many of which had fallen into disrepair and when British paratroopers landed on Bornholm towards the end of the war they found a scene none of them had been briefed about. ‘You couldn’t tell the men and women apart,’ wrote one. ‘They were more skeleton than man.’ Today, the island is the territory of the United Nations; Denmark voluntarily gave it up, its residents unwilling to return to such a place of death. Yet though the Nazis were defeated, they did succeed in one goal. For by the end of the war, Europe was largely Jew free.”
- R. Ziegler, The Holocaust: A Comprehensive History, p.2.