I draw your attention to my post which spelt out I was researching WWII form the POV of Finland. Whilst going through the newspapers in the BL Newspaper Library which was then at Colindale (now at the main building and on internet only AFAIAA) I did get distracted by what else was going on during the time period 1939 - 1945. The object of my paragraph stating this was WWII, and as an example, this included The Battle of Stalingrad as it unfolded. Another example was a fascinating article in which a correspondent reported on what the German soldiers were saying about the Brits, which could only have been from someone there with them to overhear it. Subject: WWII. At no time did I state this was a Stalingrad front line.
There you go again. It’s much too late for you to go back and delete it:
The daily on-the-spot TIMES newspaper report on the Battle of Stalingrad, together with maps and charts brought it to life for me. They even had reporters on the German front line, who must have been British secret agents to have infiltrated it in the first place.
[ETA: Would you like me to link to posts in which you defended the claim on the basis that it was about Stalingrad?]
And you even claimed to have the clipping.
When asked for further information you initially refused, then, several days later, said that it was in a column called “Through German Eyes”, and posted an image of a column which, if you didn’t read beyond the column title, looked as if it might be reporting on what ordinary Germans, perhaps even German soldiers, were saying. The image you posted was too blurry to read (at least in the device I was using), but when I tracked down the actual article it turned out to be a media round-up with no first-hand accounts, as did all the other columns under that title.
The system at the BLNL was old-fashioned microfiche. If you wanted a copy you filled in a form giving reference of what you wanted copied and paid for it. These came in size A4 or A3. I took numerous copies from British, German, Swiss, Swedish and Finnish newspapers of the day. The Third Reich papers were available in original newspaper form only and in a special section overseen by beady-eyed librarians, and you had to hold a member's card (=British Library Readers Card). Presumably because of the real threat of vandalism or theft. or accessing politically sensitive material. These newspapers tended to be very childish in tone anyway with silly cartoons. The other German language papers seemed to be largely in the old style fraktur font and difficult to read. So apart from the large expense of all the relevant photocopying, only a few were unconnected with my research subject topic matter. These included one or two 'In German Eyes' columns as they were so well-written and researched and there was an old TURUN SANOMAT that reported from 1918 on the Civil War re some of the senseless sectarian killings going on (random persons found dead on the old Härkätie, for example). The articles on ordinary Germans were interesting from a human point of view and I have copies about the huge ships set up in Murmansk used to imprison the very large numbers who went AWOL/deserted, together with the Nazi executions of the Norwegian resistance civilians, including bank managers et al . I have several box files of these newsclippings.
ISTM if you have access to the TIMES all along, then you are simply wasting my time in trying to search through my archives to find them for you, when all you need do is browse through the paper yourself and you will be sure to find it.
Correct me if I am wrong but your sole aim is to 'score a point' and is nothing at all to do with any interest at all in the subject matter.
Your claim was that the
Times had reporters eavesdropping on German soldiers’ during the battle of Stalingrad, and reporting their conversations.
There are over 600 stories mentioning Stalingrad contemporary with the battle. I’m not looking through all those. You have now shifted the goalposts by claiming, despite the post I’ve quoted above, to expand your claim from the battle of Stalingrad to the whole of WWII. I’m certainly not searching through every story published by the Times during WWII, on the off chance that your claim is actually true, without some more precise search terms.
The claim is ludicrous, even by the standards of this thread. If, as you claim, the British security services had managed to infiltrate the German front lines, the last thing they would be doing would be publishing stories in any newspaper, let alone one with an international circulation, to publicise this fact.
It’s your claim. It’s up to you to support it with verifiable references.
You’ve been caught making a ridiculous claim. When called on it, you’ve claimed that you have a reliable source for it, but without providing a reference sufficient for it to be verified. When pushed on it you have cited a newspaper column that looks from its title as if it might support the claim, but which when actually read does nothing of the sort, and you only cited the column by title rather than a particular issue of it. When tracked down, none of the issues of the column supports your original claim about the battle of Stalingrad. Again, when called on this, you’ve moved the goalposts and retreated into allegations of bad faith.
It’s a sort of microcosm of the whole thread.
