On Twitter, Hitler’s blitzkrieg rages once more

JENNIFER SCHUESSLER

The New York Times News Service

Published Sunday, Nov. 27, 2011 8:33PM EST

Last updated Monday, Nov. 28, 2011 3:51AM EST

Hitler spent decades plotting his campaign for world domination. Alwyn Collinson, 24, a recent graduate in Renaissance history from Oxford University, hatched his own plan to invade Poland in a mere five days.

On Aug. 26 Mr. Collinson was just a marketing manager at a magazine in Oxford toying with the notion of starting some kind of a real-time Twitter project that would get people?s attention ? maybe something like Orson Welles?s 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast, but that wouldn?t scare them to death.

Then suddenly he hit on the idea of tweeting the biggest terrestrial war of all time, and on Aug. 31 ? roughly 72 years to the hour after Hitler?s tanks moved across the frontier ? the Twitter feed RealTimeWWII was under way.

Since then the dominoes have fallen quickly. The number of followers jumped to 10,000 from about 300 by mid-September, after the project was featured on the blog The Next Web. By Nov. 9, the date in 1939 when two British spies were captured by the SS at the Dutch border town of Venlo, the total had hit 45,000. Last week Mr. Collinson had more than 140,000 followers, dwarfing the numbers for similar feeds like @ukwarcabinet (based on documents from the National Archives in Britain detailing Winston Churchill?s cabinet debates in 1941).

Volunteers have started translating the RealTimeWWII feed into Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, Chinese and Turkish, with talks under way for versions in French, Dutch and German.

?The amount of interest has amazed me,? Mr. Collinson said recently in a telephone interview. ?I don?t have any pretensions to grand historical scholarship. I just want to get people interested.?

He seems to have chosen an effective medium. ?Those who forget history are doomed to re-tweet it,? declares the tag line of TwHistory, an educational Web site that began in 2009 with a re-enactment of the Battle of Gettysburg in salvoes of 140 characters or less. So, apparently, are those who remember it.

Mr. Collinson puts an appealingly modest face on his wildly immodest project. Last Tuesday, while Hitler was berating his generals for their lack of faith in his ultimate triumph ? ?dramatic irony stuff,? Mr. Collinson said ? he was busy putting the finishing touches on a marketing schedule for Daily Information, the magazine where he holds down a job while pumping out up to 40 war-related tweets a day, timed as much as possible to the precise hour. (The social media tool SocialOomph helps him schedule posts for times when he?s supposed to be working or sleeping.)

?World War II gives me something to do with my time,? he said. ?The office job keeps me grounded in the real world.?

When the project began, Mr. Collinson relied mainly on ?a few authoritative books,? he said, along with whatever he could find via Google. But over time his readers have led him to some far-flung and obscure sources. One reader sent him an article from a Polish newspaper describing an assassination attempt against Hitler in October, 1939, that went unmentioned in the timelines he was consulting. Others sent links to relatives? wartime diaries, posted on little-read blogs.

Mr. Collinson said his goals are to educate his followers about the basic sequence of events and give a sense of what the war felt like to ordinary people who had no idea how it would end.

?I still get dozens of tweets every day from people who say, ?I forgot I was following World War II, and I suddenly thought the Germans were about to invade Holland,? ? Mr. Collinson said. ?That?s exactly the effect I want: to convey the fear, the uncertainty, the shock. That?s what it was like for the people who lived through it.?

New York Times News Service

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