Appeasing Hitler Read online

  At 7.42 p.m. Chamberlain entered and was cheered by his supporters. Two minutes later he was on his feet. Members leaned forward. ‘One and all were keyed up for the announcement that war had been declared’, wrote Louis Spears.11 But it did not come. After speaking wearily of the Government’s recent exchanges with Germany, the Prime Minister confirmed the rumours about an Italian proposal for a five-power conference to resolve the German–Polish dispute. Of course, he explained, it would be impossible to contemplate this while Poland was ‘being subjected to invasion’. If, however, the German Government would ‘agree to withdraw their forces, then His Majesty’s Government would be willing to regard the position as being the same as it was before the German forces crossed the Polish frontier’. Indeed, they would be prepared to associate themselves with any negotiations which then ensued.12

  The House was aghast. The Poles had suffered the most appalling bombardment for over thirty-six hours and the British Government was still prevaricating. Worse, many MPs concluded that the Prime Minister was actively seeking a shabby compromise – a second Munich. ‘Members sat as if turned to stone’, recalled Spears. ‘The shock was such that for a moment there was no more movement than there was sound when the Prime Minister sat down.’13 Not one single ‘Hear, hear’ greeted the close of Chamberlain’s statement.

  When the acting Labour leader, Arthur Greenwood, rose to reply he was hit by a wall of sound. His own MPs cheered him, as was normal, but what was extraordinary was the roar of encouragement which came from the Conservative side of the House. ‘Speak for England!’ cried the former Colonial Secretary Leo Amery.14 Taken aback, Greenwood almost staggered with surprise. He rose to the occasion, however, declaring that ‘every minute’s delay’ meant ‘imperilling our national interests … the very foundations of our national honour’. There might be good reasons for the Prime Minister’s hesitation (he was aware of the difficulty the Government was having in getting the French to commit to a time frame for the ultimatum) but this could not continue.

  The moment we look like weakening, at that moment dictatorship knows we are beaten. We are not beaten. We shall not be beaten. We cannot be beaten; but delay is dangerous, and I hope the Prime Minister … will be able to tell us when the House meets at noon tomorrow what the final decision is.15

  When Greenwood sat down there was uproar. Waving their order papers, the normally servile Tory backbenchers cheered the Labour leader until they were hoarse. ‘All those who want to die abused Caesar’, recorded the junior Foreign Office Minister Henry ‘Chips’ Channon. It was ‘the old Munich rage all over again’.16 A pacifist Labour MP tried to punch one of his more bellicose colleagues. Chamberlain went white. Well he might, thought the National Labour MP Harold Nicolson: ‘Here were the PM’s most ardent supporters cheering his opponent with all their lungs. The front bench looked as if they had been struck in the face.’17

  In his seat below the gangway, one man remained silent.

  No one had been more vindicated over the danger posed by Nazi Germany than Winston Churchill. In the longest and most desperate political battle of his life, he had campaigned noisily for rearmament and a firm stand against German aggression since 1932. Now, in this most critical moment, he was quiet. His dilemma lay in the fact that he had agreed, the previous day, to join the War Cabinet and, in one sense, considered himself already a member of the Government. On the other hand, he had heard nothing from Chamberlain since and it now appeared that Britain was vacillating over her commitment to Poland. Racked with emotion, he summoned like-minded parliamentarians for a meeting at his flat for 10.30 that evening. There, Anthony Eden, Bob Boothby, Brendan Bracken, Duff Cooper and Duncan Sandys contemplated full-blown insurrection. To Boothby’s mind, Chamberlain had lost the Conservative Party for ever and it was Churchill’s duty to go down to the House of Commons the next day and seize power for himself.

  By this time, the storm had truly broken. As thunder cracked like cannon and the rain lashed its Gothic windows, twelve members of the Cabinet staged a mutiny in Sir John Simon’s room in the Palace of Westminster. Earlier that afternoon, the Cabinet had agreed that the Italian proposal for a conference should be rejected and that an ultimatum, to expire no later than midnight, should be issued to Germany, regardless of the decision of the French. Now, the twelve Ministers – over half the Cabinet – felt that the Prime Minister had gone back on this decision and refused to leave the Chancellor’s room until Chamberlain agreed to hold another Cabinet. It was unprecedented, recalled the Minister for Agriculture, Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith: ‘We were on strike.’18

  Eventually, after much telephoning to Paris and a meeting with the French Ambassador, Chamberlain called another meeting for 11.30 p.m. Tired and grubby, the dissenting Ministers made their way through the deluge to 10 Downing Street, where they were disconcerted to discover that the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, had found time to dress for dinner. Coldly, Chamberlain apologised to the Cabinet for the misunderstanding and explained the problems he had been having with the French, who refused to contemplate an ultimatum before they had completed their mobilisation and evacuated their women and children. He was, however, prepared to accept his colleagues’ view that a British ultimatum should be issued and have expired before MPs reconvened at noon the next day. His Majesty’s Ambassador to Berlin would be instructed to call upon the German Foreign Minister at nine o’clock the following morning and deliver an ultimatum to expire at 11 a.m. British Summer Time. Did anyone object to this? No answer. ‘Right, gentlemen,’ Chamberlain summarised, ‘this means war.’ ‘Hardly had he said it’, recalled Dorman-Smith, than ‘there was a most enormous clap of thunder and the whole Cabinet Room was lit up by a blinding flash of lightning. It was the most deafening thunder-clap I’ve ever heard in my life. It really shook the building.’19

  Eleven hours later, Chamberlain broadcast to the nation.

  I

  The Hitler Experiment

  I have the impression that the persons directing the policy of the Hitler Government are not normal. Many of us, indeed, have a feeling that we are living in a country where fanatics, hooligans and eccentrics have got the upper hand.

  British Ambassador to Berlin to the Foreign Secretary, 30 June 19331

  The ice on the Thames was causing difficulties for Oxford’s rowers. In Yorkshire, the East Holderness Foxhounds had braved the frost but struggled with poor scent. There was a new polo committee of the Hurlingham Club and the popularity of professional football was having unfortunate effects on the amateur game. In ‘Home News’, behind The Times’s sports pages, a ‘Special Correspondent’ reported on the urgent need for a muniment room for the Buckinghamshire county archives; and there was a warming story about some cases of ‘serum and bacteria’, previously stolen from the back of a doctor’s car, now reunited with their owner. The lead item at the top of the ‘Imperial and Foreign’ section dealt with the exchange rate in New Zealand. Only on page ten, next to a column on the latest French Cabinet crisis, was the news that the President of the German Republic, the 85-year-old Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, had received the leader of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, Adolf Hitler, and asked him to become Chancellor of Germany.2

  The appointment of Hitler on 30 January 1933 was more exciting than the anachronistic layout of The Times implied, but not much. Since the war, German Chancellors had lasted, on average, just under a year and the economy was in the midst of the Great Depression – with 24 per cent of the workforce unemployed. The Nazis had caused mild consternation with their electoral breakthrough in 1930 and their amazing gains in July 1932, but they had lost votes later that year and many assumed that their popularity had peaked. As if proof of this, Hitler had been forced to accept a coalition Government, with the former Chancellor, the Catholic-conservative Franz von Papen, as Vice-Chancellor. Just as the conservatives, who outnumbered Nazis in the Cabinet, believed that they could control Hitler, so their presence blunted foreign anxiety. ‘Hitler h
as become Chancellor in Germany’, recorded the British Conservative MP Cuthbert Headlam, ‘but not on his own – he has von Papen as Vice-Chancellor and a good many of the National Party in his Cabinet – I don’t fancy that he will be allowed to do much.’fn13

  Nor did the figure of Hitler necessarily strike terror into the hearts of peace-loving democrats. The Daily Telegraph wondered how a man who looked so uninspiring, ‘with that ridiculous little moustache’, could prove ‘so attractive and impressive’ to the German people.4 The Liberal-supporting News Chronicle mocked the triumph of ‘the Austrian house decorator’, while the Labour Daily Herald scoffed at the ‘stubby little Austrian with a flabby handshake, shifty brown eyes, and a Charlie Chaplin moustache’. Nothing, continued the Herald, ‘in the public career of little Adolf Hitler, highly strung as a girl and vain as a matinee idol, indicates that he can escape the fate of his immediate predecessors’.5

  The previous day, following the collapse of General Kurt von Schleicher’s 55-day-old Chancellorship, The Times noted that a Hitler Government ‘was held to be the least dangerous solution of a problem bristling with dangers’.6 The Nazi leader’s commitment to eradicate the Treaty of Versailles would cause ‘some anxiety in foreign countries’ but, the paper continued the following day, ‘in fairness to the Nazis it must be admitted that they have in fact said little more on the subject of German disabilities … than the most constitutional German parties’.7 The Economist and the Spectator agreed, while the Labour-supporting New Statesman was even more sanguine: ‘We shall not expect to see the Jews’ extermination, or the power of big finance overthrown’, commented the magazine on 3 February 1933. ‘There will doubtless be an onslaught on the Communists; but if it is pressed to extremes it will provoke a powerful resistance, and may even result in a “united Marxist front” which will give the Nazis and their allies more than they bargained for.’8 As it turned out, the imperialist Morning Post was nearer the mark when it argued that the latest turn in German politics did not augur well for internal peace and predicted that the new Government was likely to ‘seek a solution of difficulties at home in adventures abroad’.9

  In France, as was so often to happen during the next six years, major events in Germany coincided with a domestic political crisis. On 28 January, the day that Schleicher resigned, the Socialists withdrew their support from Prime Minister Joseph Paul-Boncour over his plan to ‘save’ French finances with a 5 per cent increase in all direct taxes.fn2 Paul-Boncour resigned and the Radical-Socialist War Minister, Edouard Daladier, became Prime Minister for the first time.fn3 Despite this, the arrival of Hitler did not go unnoticed. ‘Germany now shows her true face’, commented Le Journal des débats, while the influential Paris-soir thought that Germany had moved one step nearer to the restoration of the monarchy and ‘a more uncompromising foreign policy’.10 Yet while some French newspapers (particularly those on the left) were alarmed, others offered more ambiguous responses. As in Britain, there were those disposed to underestimate a ‘common demagogue’ and ‘house painter’, while the French right were torn between their traditional anti-Prussianism and admiration for Hitler’s anti-communist policies. Thus, while L’Ami du peuple – owned by the super-rich perfumer and founder of the French fascist league, François Coty – recognised Hitler’s ‘implacable hatred of France’, it also believed that the Nazis were performing a great service for ‘civilisation’ by stamping out ‘the frightful experience of Bolshevism’.11 Similar sentiments, though less extremely expressed, appeared in L’Echo de Paris, Le Petit Journal and La Croix.

  The French Ambassador to Berlin, André François-Poncet, and his British counterpart, Sir Horace Rumbold, had written off Hitler at the end of 1932. Now, they were phlegmatic in the face of their predictions being confounded. ‘The Hitler experiment had to be made sometime or other’, Rumbold wrote to his son, ‘and we shall now see what it will bring forth.’12 François-Poncet agreed. ‘France has no reason to lose her calm’, he reassured Paris on 1 February 1933, but ‘must wait the actions of the new masters of the Reich’.13 They did not have to wait long.

  Hitler hardly paused a week before showing the world that the persecution and violence which had characterised his route to power were to become the hallmarks of his rule. Without a majority in the Reichstag, he persuaded Hindenburg to call fresh elections and the Nazis, now with the power of the state behind them, launched a campaign of violence and terror. Brown-shirted storm troopers broke up political meetings, smashed Communist and Social Democrat headquarters and beat up opponents. The German press was muzzled but foreign correspondents reported, with growing horror, on the daily toll of murders, beatings and suppressions. On 27 February 1933, six days before polling day, the Reichstag was set on fire. A Dutch Communist was arrested at the scene and the Nazis declared the arson the start of an attempted Bolshevik revolution. This provided Hitler with the excuse to establish his dictatorship. Civil liberties were suspended, Communists and other political opponents were arrested en masse and, on 23 March, the newly elected Reichstag voted itself into oblivion with the passage of the Enabling Act, granting Hitler the power to rule by decree. That same month, a derelict explosives factory, just north of the medieval town of Dachau in Bavaria, was converted into a camp for the ‘protective custody’ of political prisoners.

  And then there were the Jews.

  Neither Germans nor really human, according to Hitler, the Jews were to blame for the majority of Germany’s ills. From the beginning of the Nazi takeover, they were fair game for the SA, who vandalised their property and committed both assaults and murder with impunity. On 1 April 1933, the first nationwide act of persecution took place when the Nazis enacted a boycott of Jewish shops and businesses. International opinion was outraged. Forty thousand people protested in Hyde Park and there were other demonstrations in Manchester, Leeds and Glasgow, as well as New York. The Scotsman called it the ‘High Watermark of Hate’ and Lord Reading, the former Foreign Secretary and only the second nominally practising Jew to be a member of the Cabinet,fn4 resigned as President of the Anglo-German Association.14 After a day, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazis’ diminutive Propaganda Minister, lifted the boycott, but this did not halt the wholesale removal of Jews and other ‘undesirables’ from all areas of German public life. For the vast majority it was impossible to find alternative work and thousands were forced into exile. Nor, the British Ambassador noted, did the purge exclude Jews of international repute, such as the composer Arnold Schoenberg, the conductors Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer and the physicist Albert Einstein. Even Mendelssohn, who had died in 1847, could not escape the Nazi revolution and had his portrait removed from the hall of the Berlin Philharmonic.

  Of course, there were those who chose not to believe the tales of atrocities which appeared both in the newspapers and in books such as The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror and the Burning of the Reichstag, published in August 1933. Lord Beaverbrook, owner of the mass-market Daily Express and Evening Standard, for one, visited Berlin in March 1933 and came back convinced that ‘the stories of Jewish persecution are exaggerated’.15 This, predictably, was the line fed to all enquiring visitors by the German Government and its supporters – though most did not bother, or were not brave enough, to enquire. ‘All the reports abroad are humbug and lies’, wrote the ardent Nazi Colonel Ernst Heyne to the British First World War General Sir Ian Hamilton on 1 April 1933. ‘No country, I am certain, would have been so tolerant towards that crowd [the Jews] as we have been.’ Heyne went on to ask Hamilton to ‘do your utmost among your circle of friends to prevent the atmosphere from being intensified by the broadcasting of the Press [sic] of such an anti-German campaign’.16 Hamilton did not reply until October but when he did he was encouraging, complimenting Heyne on his ‘new Nazi uniform with extremely neat breeches and gaiters’. ‘Everyone is excited now about all of you over in Germany and wonders what you are going to do next. As for me, you know I am a true friend of your country and I am quite confident that in the
long run you will get where you want.’17 A few weeks later he was more emphatic, declaring in a letter to another German correspondent, ‘I am an admirer of the great Adolf Hitler and have done my best to support him through some difficult times.’18

  Hamilton was neither a fascist nor a habitual anti-Semite. Although he refused to sign a letter condemning the persecution of the German Jews, on the weak grounds that he was already involved in too many public causes, he assured the journalist and author Rebecca West that he had no ‘anti-Jewish prejudice’ and had twice been chosen to lead Jewish World War veterans towards the Cenotaph on Armistice Day.19 When Hitler came to power, Hamilton was eighty and, as one of the leading figures of the British Legion, had spent the last fifteen years unveiling war memorials and trying to help ex-servicemen. He believed passionately in the need to reconcile former enemies – not least through ex-servicemen’s associations – and in 1928, along with Lord Reading, had been a founder member of the Anglo-German Association. Last but not least, he had long considered the potential collapse of Germany to Bolshevism ‘the most deadly misfortune to Europe’.20 For all these reasons, he was not prepared to condemn the Nazi treatment of the Jews and, on the contrary, became a notable apologist for the regime.

  Hamilton’s attitude was fairly typical of his class. Although most members of Britain’s socio-political elite found Nazi Jew baiting distasteful, abhorrent even, there was a tendency among some to find excuses for it. ‘We all condemn the folly and violence of those attacks upon the Jews in Germany’, wrote the Bishop of Gloucester in his diocesan magazine in mid-1933, but it was nevertheless important to recall that ‘many Jews were responsible, particularly at the beginning, for the violence of the Russian Communists; many Jews have helped to inspire the violence of the Socialist communities; [and that] they are not altogether a pleasant element in German, and in particular in Berlin life’.21