»Nazis Wanted to Kill Sci-Fi Author HG Wells«

I'll try to make this brief for everybody, but here's an interesting story from history that I wanted to share and see if someone might help me out with some Googling to find out more:

During World War II, as early as 1939, the Nazi regime began to draw up plans for an invasion of Britain known as Operation Sea Lion ♣ ("Unternehmen Seelöwe" in German), though by 1940 the plan had been indefinitely postponed. By the time of Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, he was sure that Britain would surrender without a fight after Russia had been defeated, so Operation Sea Lion became a non-issue.

However, according to Wikipedia, towards the end of the war the Allies found out that the Nazi regime had compiled a number of lists of British intellectuals, such as writers and political figures, during the planning of Sea Lion, whom the Nazis wanted to apprehend and "liquidate" (a euphemism for "execute") once they had successfully invaded Britain. High on the list of people to be killed was the science fiction author HG Wells ♣,whose books, including The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds , are still widely read and made into movies today. As you probably know, The War of the Worlds was recently made into a summer blockbuster by Steven Spielberg.

The reason Wells was so hated by the Nazis? They wanted him dead because he was an ardent socialist who had once written approvingly of the Soviet Union in a book about a trip there, though Wells later became disillusioned with the Soviets after meeting Stalin.

The interesting thing is, though, that the Nazis might actually have been able to defeat or destroy Britain, or at least guess the Allies' strategy for ending the war, had they read Wells's works a little more closely for clues as to the eventual outcome of the war. Why? In his novel The World Set Free , published all the way back in 1914 , thirty years before the actual invention of nuclear weapons, Wells wrote: "Nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the earlier twentieth century than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible... [but] they did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands." And, the physicist Leo Szilard, who first hypothesized the creation of a nuclear bomb for the allies, acknowledged that he got the idea from Wells's book.

Quite a story. Anyway, I was looking for a copy of the list of people the Nazis wanted to kill after Operation Sea Lion. If anyone reading this can find it online, please post a link here. Much obliged.

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posted by MindSlave

"Rasta don't work for no CIA..."
-Bob Marley

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in-my-opinion.org -> Politics -> Politics and Crime (Assorted topics) -> Nazis Wanted to Kill Sci-Fi Author HG Wells

I looked, but I didn't find the complete list. Maybe it someone tried a different search engine... I'd do it myself, but I've been having some trouble with CTS, and doing another series of searches would be just the thing to make it flare up again. yuck

Other people on the list were Sir Winston Churchill, C.P. Snow, and J.B. Priestly, if that helps.

posted by Sharaith

Sharaith:

CTS= Carpal Tunnel Syndrome? That sucks, I've heard it hurts. Thanks for your efforts though.

Sharaith:

Other people on the list were Sir Winston Churchill, C.P. Snow, and J.B. Priestly, if that helps.

LOL, I had to look up who Snow and Priestly were (both authors of popular literature and social commentators.) So much for my literature degree! White laugh

posted by MindSlave

MindSlave:

CTS= Carpal Tunnel Syndrome? That sucks, I've heard it hurts.

Not really hurts - kind of tingles. I've only had it mildly, though, so far.

You know, I'll bet that Alan Turing was on that list too. He was one of the main codebreakers on the Allied side, and helped build early computers to decode German messages.

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posted by Sharaith

Sharaith:

You know, I'll bet that Alan Turing was on that list too. He was one of the main codebreakers on the Allied side, and helped build early computers to decode German messages.

All Turing's work on codebreaking was classified, though, and not revealed publicly until thirty years after the end of the war (twenty years after his death.)

posted by MindSlave

MindSlave:

All Turing's work on codebreaking was classified, though, and not revealed publicly until thirty years after the end of the war (twenty years after his death.)

Still, I'd assume that Nazi intelligence would be good enough to find out what he was doing during the war.

posted by Sharaith

Sharaith:

MindSlave:

All Turing's work on codebreaking was classified, though, and not revealed publicly until thirty years after the end of the war (twenty years after his death.)

Still, I'd assume that Nazi intelligence would be good enough to find out what he was doing during the war.

No, in my opinion they were not that good. It has been suggested that the war was shortened by at least a year by the cracking of the Enigma code and the large number of secret messages the Allies were consequently able to translate. If the Nazis had known that the codebreakers at Bletchley Park (where Turing worked and which the Nazis had no idea existed) had cracked the Enigma code, why would they have continued to use that code? And even if the Nazis somehow knew about the Bletchley Park operation, how in the world would they have known the individual people who were secretly working there?

I think what you are looking at with the Sea Lion list is a list of famous or public figures, not a list of everyone in Britain who endangered the Nazi regime.

posted by MindSlave

The time now is 24 May 2012, 21:49
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