Appeasement 2.0
The low point of Russia’s war in Ukraine is that Trummkopf, has repeated Chamberlain’s mistake at Munich and presented Putin with Appeasement 2.0.
I wasn’t around in the days of Munich and Chamberlain, but my father was well-informed, as he was in Geneva doing something possibly at the League of Nations and heard a lot of the truth about what was going on in Czechoslovakia and Ukraine at first hand. He believed there was little to choose between Hitler and Stalin on the scale of evil.
In the 1970s, I worked with an Jewish Austrian engineer, who was called Samuels, at the GLC, who had escaped from Austria just before WW2 and then spent the war in the Royal Engineers in bomb disposal. After the war, he was an observer at Nuremberg.
He was one of the most amazing people, I’ve ever met and he taught me a lot about project management.
Aggregation In Artemis
One of the features of Artemis was aggregation, which enabled the project manager to total up the resources they’d need for a project.
I might have programmed the original aggregation for Mr. Samuels, but I can certainly remember discussing it with him. He needed it to check that particular sub-contractors weren’t overstreching themselves.
I lost contact with Mr. Samuels, when his wife died and he moved to CERN in Geneva. But he’s one of several people, who helped frame the design of Artemis.
Soviet War Crimes
This Wikipedia entry is entitled Soviet War Crimes.
This is the first paragraph.
From 1917 to 1991, a multitude of war crimes and crimes against humanity were carried out by the Soviet Union or any of its Soviet republics, including the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and its armed forces. They include acts which were committed by the Red Army (later called the Soviet Army) as well as acts which were committed by the country’s secret police, NKVD, including its Internal Troops. In many cases, these acts were committed upon the direct orders of Soviet leaders Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin in pursuance of the early Soviet policy of Red Terror as a means to justify executions and political repression. In other instances they were committed without orders by Soviet troops against prisoners of war or civilians of countries that had been in armed conflict with the USSR, or they were committed during partisan warfare.
As a teenager, my father used to tell me stories of atrocities by the Soviet Union and told me, he believed Stalin was on a level with Hitler.
One of the worst atrocities was the Katyn massacre in 1940, which is described in this Wikipedia entry and starts with this paragraph.
The Katyn massacre was a series of mass executions of nearly 22,000 Polish military and police officers, border guards, and intelligentsia prisoners of war carried out by the Soviet Union, specifically the NKVD (the Soviet secret police), at Joseph Stalin’s order in April and May 1940. Though the killings also occurred in the Kalinin and Kharkiv NKVD prisons and elsewhere, the massacre is named after the Katyn forest, where some of the mass graves were first discovered by Nazi German forces in 1943.
I haven’t found out, what my father was doing in 1940, but I am fairly sure he knew of the Katyn and other massacres, as he occasionally commented.
Note.
- The involvement of the NKVD.
- The Katyn massacre is a sub-plot in the film Enigma, which has this Wikipedia entry.
I took this picture of a memorial to Katyn in the centre of Birmingham.
I believe that we ignore the lessons of Soviet behaviour at Katyn, at our peril.
In Vladimir Putin’s Wikipedia entry, there is this paragraph about his parents.
Putin’s mother was a factory worker, and his father was a conscript in the Soviet Navy, serving in the submarine fleet in the early 1930s. During the early stage of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, his father served in the destruction battalion of the NKVD. Later, he was transferred to the regular army and was severely wounded in 1942. Putin’s maternal grandmother was killed by the German occupiers of Tver region in 1941, and his maternal uncles disappeared on the Eastern Front during World War II.
It appears that Putin Senior left the NKVD destruction battalion before 1942. Does that mean he could have been at Katyn?
I do suspect, that Putin Senior told some interesting stories to his son, about the correct ways to deal with your opponents and wage a war.
Conclusion
We are treading a very similar path over eighty years later.
From Berlin To Munich In Four Hours By Train
The length of the East Coast Main Line between London Kings Cross and Edinburgh is 632 kilometres.
Deutsche Bahn have recently completed an upgraded High Speed Line between Berlin and Munich, which has a length of 623 kilometres.
Both lines are not the very fastest of High Speed Lines, but lines where a consistent two hundred kilometres per hour is possible.
The East Coast Main Line was built in Victorian times and services typically take around twenty minutes over four hours, with nine-car InterCity 225 trains running twice an hour.
The Berlin-Munich route was originally built over two centuries ago, but the Germans have spent twenty-five years and many billions of euros punching a new route between Berlin and Nuremberg, through the difficult countryside of Thuringen Forest.
The route may allow the Germans to travel from Berlin to Munich in three hours fifty-five minutes, but at present you can only do it three times a day in a six-car train.
I took the lunchtime train and sat in First Class for a hundred and fourteen euros.
These are some of the pictures, that I took.
We were on time in Munich! Although reading an article in the February 2018 Edition of Modern Railways and talking to other passengers, the introduction of the service had been far from smooth, due to signalling issues.
Just as British Rail’s four-hour service took passengers from the airlines, Deutsche Bahn’s intention is to do the same.
But they will have to improve things.
Service Frequency
Three six-car trains every day in under four hours is just not enough trains, to compete with the airlines.
The plans for the London to Edinburgh route include an all-day frequency of a train every thirty minutes and when the new Class 801 trains are running under control of modern signalling, then many of these trains will do the journey in under four hours.
Route Capacity
The trains need to offer more capacity to provide a service to compete with the airlines.
Customer Service
In my four-hour journey, I was offered just one hot drink! I took a cup of hot chocolate and I had to pay a few euros for it.
I’m sure, Virgin Trains East Coast offer a better service on the East Coast route.
Conclusion
Properly developed, this route can become one of Europe’s main trunk rail routes.
The Modern Railways article compares the service with the new Paris-Bordeaux High Speed Line.
However, DB’s initial offering seems rather timid – 17 trains each way (compare this to the service between Paris and Bordeaux after opening of a new line in July 2017 – 27 trains each way daily!).
The article finishes with this paragraph.
When the Berlin to Nuremberg plan was being developed in the mid-1990s both the Government and DB assumed up to 137 trains each way would use the new line. It was expected the majority would be freight, with at least 20 ICE services each way as well as slower semi-fast services. Currently 35 ICE services use the full line with 18 regional services using the 20 km. section too. Freight traffic has not yet begun and seems unlikely to for several more years, if at all.
Deutsche Bahn has a lot of work to do.
If they get this service right, it must open up a lot of possibilities for new business and leisure services.
As an example, I’ve come across many Americans, Canadians and others on East Coast Main Line services, who’ve flown into Scotland and after visiting Edinburgh, London and possibly Paris, will fly back West.
Berlin to Munich must surely open up similar possibilities in Germany.
Left Luggage Lockers In Germany
All of the stations, I visited in Germany had lots of left luggage lockers.
Left Luggage Lockers In Munich
These in Munich, which easily took my small case cost just €3.00 for 72 hours.
i used them in both Munich and Nuremberg.
A Disastrous Attempt At A Meal
I tried to eat in Nuremberg and found it difficult. Eventually, I was served a meal, but as you can see it was cooked in flour.
A Disastrous Attempt At A Meal
I’ll say this though, they didn’t charge me.
What seemed lacking in all my searching was a restaurant that was serving something like a salad Nicoise.
Eventually, I bought a good fruit salad from a stall.
it Salad From Nuremberg
At least I got a fork with it.
A Quick Look At Nuremberg
When I got to Nuremberg, it started to rain and I quickly found that the city was booked solid because of a massive exhibition.
I had particularly wanted to go to Nuremberg, as one of my customers years ago, had been an observer at the War Crimes Trials in the city. He was an Austrian Jew, who escaped before the war and had then spent the war years in the Royal Engineers. He had some amazing tales.
But because of the lack of a decent hotel, I decided to move on to Munich. Next time, I’ll book the Victoria Hotel, which is right by the station.
From Vienna To Nuremberg By ICE Train
The trip was four and three-quarter hours in the ICE train.
In some ways it reminded me of parts of the East Coast Main Line in the UK, where you travel for miles through flat and green countryside. But as you can see, you do have the Danube appearing at times.
Lokking at the route now, it would have been better to perhaps split the journey into two, with a stop at somewhere like Regensburg, which definitely seems a place worth visiting. So perhaps a sensible rule on a trip like this, is to check where your train stops between your overnight stops. Bear in mind, that the three German cities I explored, all had their stations in the centre.
It wasn’t all German efficiency though, as there was no coffee on the first part of the journey, as the buffet had no hot water.
But otherwise it was a trip that went smoothly.
Leaving Vienna
On Thursday, the 11th, I took the train out of Vienna for Nuremberg.
As you can see I got up early and caught one of the German ICE trains at 06:52.
One of the strange things was that the free magazine was hung up on a string in the carriage. But that was also done on Metro trains in Vienna.
The Anonymous Widower 