Reporting on Hitler

by Wainewright, Will;

  Reynolds interviewed Hitler and reported his words to readers in Britain. ‘This day should be a lesson to those who believe that they can rob a nation by terror or force of its character, who believe that they can tear out a piece of a nation and steal its soul,’ the Nazi leader declared. ‘Blood is stronger than any paper documents. By the plebiscite you have eased my task extremely, which is to make Germany happy.’321

  The celebrations culminated in a large fireworks display and a torchlit procession led by the Nazi storm troopers. Grant Duff was present for Hitler’s speech and the ceremony. As she noted down his words she was surrounded by storm troopers, who aggressively questioned her motives. Only after showing her British passport and press card, and receiving some assistance from a local policeman, did they leave her alone. The message was clear: the Nazis were in charge of the Saar region now.

  In contrast to most of their correspondents in Berlin, British newspapers still did not view Hitler as a threat in 1935. Most took him at his word when he said he had peaceful intentions. After the Saar plebiscite, The Times printed an article penned by a pro-German friend of the editor Geoffrey Dawson. Hitler ‘has said explicitly to me, as he has also said publicly, that what Germany wants is equality, not war; that she is prepared absolutely to renounce war,’ it said.322 His word was enough.

  Hitler was emboldened by victory in the Saar. On 12 March he announced that Germany would be re-starting conscription in breach of the Treaty of Versailles. He also publicly announced plans for the country’s rearmament, a process he had secretly worked on since taking power in 1933. These aggressive steps were accompanied by a peace offer that many publications in Britain were taken in by. They took the easy route of believing that Hitler had good intentions rather than opting to criticise him for his actions. Norman Ebbutt of The Times saw straight through Hitler’s combination of sweet words and malicious deeds. He encouraged the other reporters in Berlin to scrutinise Hitler and watch him closely. ‘Ebbutt keeps reminding me to be very sceptical,’ William Shirer recorded in his diary.323

  Ebbutt’s paper was not as critical as he would have liked. A line in Ebbutt’s report that focused on how the development breached conditions agreed at Versailles was cut from later editions. A Times editorial was cautious rather than condemnatory.324 It was an early sign of a tension between the reporter and his paper that would grow with time.

  France and Russia responded to Hitler’s bullish moves by agreeing the Franco-Soviet Pact in May 1935. Meanwhile, Jews in Berlin continued to face greater hardships. ‘Many Jews come to us these days for advice or help in getting to England or America, but unfortunately there is little we can do for them,’ Shirer noted sadly in his diary.325 Hitler’s announcements about conscription and rearmament breathed fresh fire into the growing debate about Britain’s military firepower. Churchill and Lord Vansittart were at the vanguard of a group of senior figures arguing that the country must rearm to counter any possible threat from Germany. Attempts at disarmament in Europe earlier in the 1930s had failed, they said, and Britain must be prepared for the worst.

  The pair were joined by the unlikely figure of Lord Rothermere, who in spite of his warm relations with Hitler was one of those arguing loudest for quicker rearmament, particularly in the air. Rothermere had continued to use his newspaper to publicly support Hitler in Europe: Hitler and Rothermere had been exchanging compliments since the start of the decade and met for the first time in 1933. The relationship had strengthened since then and not been harmed by Rothermere’s decision to abandon the fascist movement in Britain.

  What Hitler did not know, however, was that while Rothermere’s Daily Mail was talking up the Nazis in public, in private its owner was issuing drastic warnings about the threat Germany may pose. He described the Nazi leadership as dangerous and ruthless oligarchs in a letter to Neville Chamberlain, Ramsay MacDonald’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, in October 1934.326 In a separate letter that year he wrote to Lady Vansittart to say that he was cultivating a friendship with Hitler that may prove useful if relations soured. He said he would be more than happy to act as a go-between in talks between Britain and Germany. His double-handed approach to Hitler – to offer him support in public while offering warnings in private to British politicians – was curious. It may have been sincere. But it was also a way of covering his back in case it transpired his Nazi friends harboured malicious intentions.

  He was apparently sincere in his offers to help Britain’s leaders deal with Hitler. He sent copies of his letter exchanges with Hitler to Lord Vansittart, which undoubtedly contributed to the senior diplomat’s keenly held views about Hitler. He made repeated warnings to the top of government about the lack of defences he perceived in Britain. He feared the country was vulnerable, particularly in the air. Like his friend Churchill, Rothermere loved flying and had a daredevil attitude to the new technology. He flew more than senior politicians – Neville Chamberlain did not step into an aeroplane until 1939. It was more than a personal passion – during the middle of the 1930s, Rothermere fought a national campaign in his newspapers to try and make the government spend more on its emerging air force. He sent warnings to Ramsay MacDonald in 1934 about the strength of German airpower. Whether the Prime Minister, who had been the first Labour politician to hold the role, was inclined to accept help from the owner of the newspaper behind the forged Zinoviev letter in 1924 can only be guessed at.

  In other quarters, opinion was similarly mixed about Rothermere’s efforts. They doubted his motives in corresponding with Hitler, even if the letters were secretly passed on. King George V’s reaction to Rothermere’s exchange of letters over an Anglo-German understanding in 1935 was cold. He and his courtiers found it to be a ‘great surprise’ that Rothermere was engaging in correspondence with Hitler.

  For Rothermere the matter of air power was an obsession bordering on neurosis. He sent letter after letter to the country’s leading politicians, both before and after the Conservative Party’s Stanley Baldwin had won power in November 1935, to emphasise German air superiority over Britain. Chamberlain’s response to one letter in October 1934 was typical of a government mindset that failed to recognise the importance of air power and did not believe the rumours about how quickly Germany was rearming. ‘Aeroplanes at present do not bring us food or raw materials, and we must protect the trade routes,’ he wrote. ‘Armies are still necessary, if only to ensure us suitable locations for Air Forces.’327

  On this, however, Rothermere was right. And some took notice of what he had to say. One of the most important people to listen to Rothermere was Churchill – yet he was in no position to directly affect the situation. This changed as the 1930s progressed and Churchill was able to draw on a wide range of informers to form a full picture of German rearmament. He became more influential as he was able to oppose the government’s foreign policy on an informed basis. But even he was at times exasperated by Rothermere’s dual approach to Hitler. ‘I was disgusted to see the Daily Mail’s boosting of Hitler,’ Churchill wrote to his wife, Clementine, later in the 1930s. Rothermere ‘wants us to be very strongly armed and frightfully obsequious at the same time. Thus he hopes to avoid seeing another war. Anyhow, it is a more practical attitude than our socialist politicians. They wish us to remain disarmed and exceedingly abusive.’328

  The more ‘establishment’ figures in government viewed the pair as irresponsible, trouble-making outsiders. A letter in 1935 from Lord Londonderry, the Secretary of State for Air, thanking Churchill and Rothermere for raising awareness about Britain’s weakness in the air, rang hollow. ‘Success was due to your being able to frighten the people of the country by giving them wholly exaggerated figures.’329

  Rothermere did at least back his private pleas to government with some action. In 1935 he started the National League of Airmen, which aimed to increase air force strength, and made donations to the RAF. In 1936, the Daily Mail started a campaign – ‘Arming in the Air’ – which highlighted the newspaper’s �
�Warnings of Three Wasted Years’ and argued for a larger air force. He then funded the development of a new breed of warplane, which he donated to the RAF – and which became the Blenheim Bomber.

  ‘He combined awareness of the danger to Britain implicit in German rearmament with a belief that a rearmed Britain could be firm friends with a rearmed Germany,’ concluded one writer in the Sunday Times. ‘He saw Hitler as a sincere man who had defeated communism in his own country and whose programme was now to reverse the Diktat of Versailles.’330

  Rothermere’s balancing of support for Hitler in public with warnings in private set the tone for attitudes taken by newspapers throughout the 1930s. As we will see, others on the right, most notably The Times, were criticised for their pro-German reporting, yet argued for rearming far more than papers on the left, including the Guardian, even though that newspaper was much more vocal in its criticism of Hitler.

  - CHAPTER XI -

  RHINELAND

  The Nazis celebrated their third anniversary of taking power in January 1936. They had achieved much in the first three years, consolidating their control over Germany and making territorial gains in the Saar. The Daily Mail greeted this landmark with more enthusiasm than other major British newspapers. ‘The enemies who so persistently predicted [Hitler’s] early fall have had to confess their complete want of foresight,’ it said in a leading article. ‘At the end of three years of power he is stronger than ever and more popular with his countrymen.’331

  Ebbutt in The Times marked the anniversary with less fanfare. ‘That three years of contact with hard realities have brought a certain amount of disillusionment to the party and to the country at large is not to be denied,’ he wrote in a long article about Germany. ‘Not everyone is so confident as the Storm Troopers who marched through the streets singing.’332 Ebbutt’s article reflected how he and the correspondents in Berlin were feeling. The mood was despondent. In February Ebbutt made his feelings clear to the American ambassador in Berlin, William Dodd. ‘I only wish I could leave this country. Everything here is in such a condition and all of us newspaper people kept in such a state of mind that life is miserable.’333

  Working under the constraints imposed by Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry was taking its toll. The Nazi propagandist tried to keep foreign correspondents in as much darkness about what was going on in Germany as the wider population. In January, Shirer noted details in his diary about Goebbels’s secret daily orders to the press. ‘They made rich reading, ordering daily suppression of the truth,’ he wrote. ‘The German people, unless they can read foreign newspapers (the London Times has an immense circulation here now), are terribly cut off from events in the outside world and of course are told nothing of what is happening behind the scenes in their own country.’334

  In February, Germany was scheduled to host the Winter Olympics in Bavaria and the Nazi regime started the year keen to show its best side to the world. ‘The Nazis at Garmisch had pulled down all the signs saying that Jews were unwanted (they’re all over Germany),’ Shirer wrote in his diary. ‘The Olympic visitors would thus be spared any signs of the kind of treatment meted out to the Jews in this country.’335

  The newly built Messe Berlin exhibition hall, which hosted Olympic events in 1936, pictured a year later. (PA-1456 Thomas Neumann, The National Archives of Norway)

  The Manchester Guardian’s Frederick Voigt was by this time the paper’s diplomatic correspondent in London. This was a roving role that involved reporting and commentating on foreign affairs generally, but he continued to take a special interest in Germany. In the opening months of 1936, his coverage of events in the country was superior to reports sent by British journalists based in Berlin, who knew that over-critical reports would result in their expulsion. Voigt was nonetheless brave to continue his investigative work relating to Germany – the Gestapo had long before marked his card and there had been fears for his safety even when he was based beyond German borders in Paris.

  ‘You are the channel through which practically all the damning exposures of what goes on in Germany gets into the paper,’ his editor William Crozier wrote to him in January 1934. ‘It must long ago have occurred to these people … that if they could get rid of you they would stop off the supply of damning stuff to the [Manchester Guardian]. I hope, therefore, that you will distrust everybody and everything, and take great care not to be alone in lonely places.’336

  Voigt had been born the son of a German wine merchant in Hampstead in 1892 and joined the Guardian in 1919. A year later he was despatched to Germany and spent the 1920s reporting on the rise and fall of the Weimar Republic. He had been deeply suspicious of Hitler from 1930 onwards and did his best to warn readers in Britain with sharp accounts of the Jewish Boycott and intimidation in the Saar. In February 1936 he wrote more articles of the kind that made Crozier fear for his safety. Under the headline of ‘The “Opposition” in Germany’, he reported on the dangers facing Hitler’s political opponents:

  Their existence is one of extreme peril, of nervous tension, and drab poverty. Their self-set task is to create centres of action and resistance for the day when general discontent shall take political form in Germany. They are a kind of ‘Iron Guard’ that is preparing to lead the revolt against one of the worst tyrannies of modern times. To be an active member of this ‘opposition’ is more dangerous than it was to be in the trenches. The casualties are very high; and, whereas a man who was wounded in the trenches would frequently be in kind hands, whether of friend or of foe, German political prisoners are often deliberately injured after capture by their foes.337

  The vivid report ended with a swipe towards the reporters who chose to focus on the economic achievements of the Nazis. After referencing an unfair trial staged by Hitler’s regime, Voigt concluded: ‘It is such trials rather than the speeches of Herr Hitler, the new buildings, the motor roads, and the unemployment figures that tell the truth about the Third Reich.’ He followed this report eleven days later with one which maddened the Nazis further, headlined ‘How the “Gestapo” Works’. This was the first detailed account of Hitler’s barbaric secret police force to be published. He describes its leader Heinrich Himmler as ‘a man of great charm, an able organiser, and completely ruthless’, and says the Gestapo is ‘now one of the most efficient instruments of tyrannical power in the world’.338 The piece describes how the Gestapo’s organisational structure allows it to monitor the German population for signs of disobedience or disloyalty. It went beyond anything published in other papers at the time.

  Voigt’s elevation to diplomatic correspondent had been one of Crozier’s first acts after assuming the editorship two years earlier. ‘I think we can do with a little more of the spirit of Milton and Cromwell in respect of German topics,’ Crozier had written to Voigt. ‘As you and I think, I believe, pretty well on common lines as to what we could do and the duty of the Guardian to do it, I am looking forward to some interesting cooperation.’339The pair shared a good working understanding on most topics, though an awkward fissure developed over German rearmament during the 1930s. Voigt was frequently nudging his editor on the issue and wanted the Guardian to take a firmer line in support of British rearmament. ‘If we were not rearming, Germany would certainly prepare to attack France, leaving her Eastern plans until later on. If war is averted at all, it will be British rearmament that will have done it,’ Voigt wrote to Crozier in February 1936.340

  Voigt was a rare voice on the left wing of the newspaper industry in arguing for more rearmament. Together with the News Chronicle and Daily Herald, the Guardian was one of the newspapers most openly critical of Hitler and the Nazis in the 1930s. Yet these prescient warnings were not accompanied by calls for greater British rearmament until much later in the decade. It fell to papers on the other side of the political spectrum to make the case for rearmament. The right-wing Morning Post newspaper led the way. As early as January 1936, the paper began a defence campaign with a leading article on ‘what the country is not tol
d’.341 Its reporter in Berlin, Karl Robson, had been clear about the possible long-term threat posed by Hitler, and his paper had strongly and clearly relayed the message. The Times, Telegraph, Daily Express and Daily Mail were the other right-wing newspapers calling for more rearmament in 1936.

  On Saturday 7 March 1936 the Daily Mail started a competition: a ‘moneyprize contest’ for ideas from readers on how the country could increase its number of military volunteers.342 The timing of such discussion about defence was uncanny, for it coincided with an event that prompted European countries to dramatically reconsider their state of arms. On that Saturday, Hitler ordered his troops to march into the Rhineland territory between France and Germany in a clear breach of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. The industrial region had been demilitarised since 1930, when international forces stationed there since the war had departed. But Germany was required by Versailles to keep military forces out of the region, which was similarly rich in resources to the Saar – but much bigger. This was Hitler’s most brazen act of international defiance so far.

  On the day of the invasion, politicians and diplomats in Britain scrambled to get information about German intentions. Would Hitler follow his move into the Rhineland with other territorial claims? Only one British man successfully got hold of Hitler in the immediate aftermath of the Rhineland invasion – and he was a journalist. When news of the troop movements broke in London, Price of the Daily Mail headed straight for the airport and took the first available plane to Berlin. In the evening he spent an hour with Göring and Hitler, who repeated their familiar arguments about the supposedly unfair terms agreed at Versailles. They claimed their country had a historic right to remilitarise the Rhineland. As ever, they sugared the pill of their aggression with an olive branch. Hitler offered to return Germany to the League of Nations. He also said he would sign a non-aggression pact with France and a separate air pact outlawing the use of bombs during war. Price returned to London the next day and briefed Lord Halifax personally, acting as an intermediary between the Nazis and the British government. He had better access than any other Briton in Berlin, even Ambassador Phipps. ‘Hitler won’t see me,’ Phipps said to Price indignantly on one occasion.343