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Michael Lonsdale as Hugo Drax<\/p>\n
20TH CENTURY FOX<\/p>\n
\u201cWe believe Fleming saw files seized directly from German weapons companies such as Krupp, Rheinmetall and others,\u201d Tobias Schwesig, the Bond Club chairman, said. \u201cFleming didn\u2019t have to imagine these dark industrial conspiracies \u2014 we believe he saw them directly.\u201d<\/p>\n
There is nothing new about the notion that Fleming drew heavily on the Third Reich in his books for a postwar British readership that had fresh and indelible memories of the existential struggle against Nazi dictatorship. The novel claim from the Wattenscheid Bond enthusiasts is that Fleming was quite specifically thinking of intelligence he had picked up on the inner workings of German arms companies.<\/p>\n
The Ruhr valley around Bochum was the heartland of Nazi Germany\u2019s defence industry. Thyssen, a steelmaker in Duisburg, provided the backbone of the Wehrmacht\u2019s tanks and warships. Rheinmetall-Borsig, headquartered in D\u00fcsseldorf, turned out much of its artillery and ammunition. Mannesmann, also operating from D\u00fcsseldorf, furnished it with tubes and steel for military vehicles and oil pipelines. <\/p>\n
By the end of the Second World War, these firms had left a long paper trail of illegal rearmament in the Weimar Republic era, and war profiteering and the exploitation of forced labour under the Nazis. In early 1945, as the Allies fought their way through Germany, a group of British commandos known as 30 Assault Unit (30AU), which had been founded by Fleming, were tasked with mopping up enemy documents or other sources of information that might come in handy after the war.<\/p>\n
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Charles Gray as Ernst Blofeld in Diamonds Are Forever<\/p>\n
UNITED ARTISTS<\/p>\n
The full extent of the unit\u2019s activities on German soil remains obscure but one of its most important targets was the naval archive at Schloss Tambach, a sprawling baroque country house in the far north of Bavaria. <\/p>\n
T-Force, a joint British-American army mission that was significantly larger but performed a similar function to 30AUs, is also known to have raided several German defence-industrial facilities such as the Walter KG complex in Kiel, which worked on propulsion systems for V1 rockets and Messerschmitt and Heinkel fighter aircraft.<\/p>\n
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