The timing of Hitler’s ‘Saturday surprise’ in the Rhineland meant Britain’s daily newspapers had more than a day to decide how to report on events. By the time readers picked up their papers on Monday, the initial shock of Hitler’s action had subsided. Though some judged his actions harshly, many newspapers were satisfied that Hitler’s subsequent words were proof that he and Germany wanted reconciliation, not war. The arch-appeaser Lord Lothian summed up the feelings of many Britons when he likened the action to Germany walking into its own back garden.
Hitler would have been gleeful at the Daily Mail’s verdict. ‘Germany’s latest stroke may be said, indeed, to have cleared the air. Like a fresh breeze from the mountaintops it has swept away the fog and shown exactly where she stands,’ it said in an editorial on 9 March. ‘This is a moment when it is most important to be aware of the Bolshevik trouble-makers.’344 Almost all papers agreed that Hitler’s offer of peace talks should not be ignored. William Ewer in the Daily Herald said to refuse the offer would have been to ‘have bitten off our noses to spite the Führer’s face’.345
Hitler’s activity in the Rhineland caused a split in the newsroom of The Times, marking the start of a division among the paper’s staff, which would soon widen. Colin Coote, a leader-writer, hoped that Hitler’s action would be met with criticism from the influential Times comment pages. The task of writing the leading article fell to his colleague, Leo Kennedy. ‘I rushed hopefully into his room expecting that this breaking of the Führer’s own pledges would be castigated,’ Coote wrote. Instead, he found Kennedy writing an article very different in tone, entitled ‘A Chance to Rebuild’.346
The leader in The Times was ambiguous, mixing criticism of German actions with the open-ended conclusion that ‘it is the moment, not to despair, but to rebuild’.347 Yet Ebbutt saw straight through Hitler’s offers of peace. ‘The people at the head of this show are pure gamblers and do not care two buttons for the League of Nations, which was thrown in by Ribbentrop as a sop to British public opinion,’ he wrote to Dawson in the following days. The Times correspondent knew the Nazis’ lightning capture of the Rhineland was just the latest – and certainly not the last – expansion step planned by Germany. ‘They are extremely formidable, and I do not believe for one moment that their ambitions will be satisfied by the settlement which may come out of the present negotiations.’348 His paper’s verdict on the Rhineland did not match this conclusion.
The Guardian thought Hitler had a case for his move into the Rhineland. ‘For Germans to insist on defending their own territory with arms is not the same heinous moral offence, nor deserving the same penalties, as waging war, like Mussolini, on an unoffending country or preparing a base for an actual invasion.’349 Italy was at the time fighting a colonial war in Abyssinia (modern-day Ethiopia), which had drawn international condemnation. The German action did not look so bad by comparison.
Only the Telegraph criticised the peace offer. ‘Great Britain would herself in other circumstances have welcomed unreservedly the suggestion of Germany’s return to the League [of Nations],’ the paper asserted. ‘But the actual circumstances are what they are – the flagrant repudiation of treaties, the assertion of glorification of overpowering military strength, and the promise of good neighbourliness.’350 In his diplomatic correspondence column, the Guardian’s Voigt struck a similar line – and was more critical of the Nazis than his paper. The peace offer was ‘cleverly attuned to the weakness of the collective system and is at the same time a skilful peace of demagogy,’ he wrote a couple of days later.351 Robson of the Morning Post was especially stinging in his criticisms of the Nazi leadership. He called Goebbels ‘the biggest organiser of deception the world has ever seen’.352 The Gestapo added this to their growing dossier on Robson and from this moment, his days in Berlin were numbered.
On 29 March, Germany held elections that the Nazis made into a vote on their action in the Rhineland. Remilitarising the strip of land between Germany and France had been wildly popular among Germans. Great cities such as Düsseldorf and Cologne had been brought back firmly under militarised German control. Ebbutt in The Times was especially perceptive in his article the day before the election:
The number of Germans who do not vote for Herr Hitler tomorrow is far short of the total which has misgivings about the present regime. Its work has been done at the expense of freedom, truth, and justice as these are conceived in the Western world, and some who feel bound to support the Führer tomorrow on the patriotic issue will do so in fear and trembling that they are delivering Germany over to a new wave of National-Socialist fanaticism.353
The Nazis were not confident enough to allow a free election. It was tarnished by voter intimidation and a lack of choice for electors; if you wanted to vote against the regime you had to deface the ballot paper. The official result was a backing of 98 per cent for the Nazis. The Daily Herald and News Chronicle delivered blistering criticisms of the outcome. The Daily Express, however, spoke in favour, setting the tone for its appeasing coverage during the rest of the 1930s. The newspaper’s single aim at this time was to keep Britain out of another world war, meaning that foreign aggression or tyranny was seldom judged too critically. More surprising was the Manchester Guardian’s leading article, which asked: ‘What other answer would the English people have made had they been asked, after a war which led to their disarmament, whether they maintained their right to fortify the coasts of Kent and Sussex?’ But it did highlight shortcomings in the election process.
The most serious aspect of the election is the proof [of] how a whole people, by a process based ultimately upon terrorism and carried through by every form of propaganda, may be gathered up and concentrated into a single, solid instrument in the hands of the dictatorship.354
Voigt continued to report without fear on worsening conditions inside Germany. A report on 1 April 1936 revealed how prisoners inside concentration camps were being treated – ‘No Improvement in Germany’, ran the headline. ‘It grows more and more difficult to establish the facts about the Terror in Germany because the precautions taken to ensure secrecy have become much more elaborate,’ he wrote. But Voigt gave several examples of the kind of punishment meted out to prisoners, many of whom were Jewish. Describing the flogging of one Jew, he wrote: ‘After eighteen lashes he began to whimper. But the flogging went on until he lost consciousness.’ Outside the concentration camps, Voigt wrote that the ‘Terror’ is now inflicted by the Gestapo rather than storm troopers. ‘There are no legal guarantees for those who fall into the hands of the Gestapo… Many prisoners have been beaten to death, and many have died after lingering awhile as a result of their treatment at the hands of the Gestapo.’355
After receiving this dispatch Crozier wrote a glowing letter to his correspondent, telling him it would be in the next day’s edition. ‘No one but yourself could have got that for the paper. The S. S. know perfectly well that you are the author and, in general, are the most serious opponent of Nazi Germany in the English press, and, further, as you yourself know, they conspired against you in Paris.’356 But all was not rosy between the pair. Voigt continued to want Crozier to use the Guardian to argue more strongly in favour of British rearmament. His strong convictions made him difficult to handle for the Guardian’s leadership. On at least thirteen occasions in 1936, Crozier either advised Voigt to tone down his diplomatic correspondence columns or refused to publish parts altogether.357
‘I don’t think you would expect us possibly to print the latter half of your article. I think you know that we have to make the best, and not the worst of this business of dealing with Germany,’ Crozier wrote to Voigt on 18 March. ‘Don’t think that I am deluded about Hitler and his aims and methods, but I do think there is at least as much to be said for taking him at his word, or, if you like, calling his bluff, as for refusing to have any dealings with him at all.’358 Voigt was overruled.
Newspapers on the right continued to shout loudly about the need to rearm. ‘It is madn
ess for Great Britain to remain unarmed when Germany and Italy are armed to the teeth and able at any moment to attack our vital interests,’ the Daily Mail said on 7 July 1936.359 Its star correspondent Price boiled this message down into a simple catchphrase: ‘Negotiate – but arm.’ The Times took up the message strongly. ‘Everyone is agreed in these days that British foreign policy must have the backing of far greater strength to enforce it,’ a leading article said on 6 July.360
Hitler had got away with his action in the Rhineland. There was no unified international response despite his clear breach of the agreement struck at Versailles. Following the election at the end of March, the ‘Olympic Pause’ commenced. As with the Winter Olympics earlier in the year, the Nazis made sure not to aggravate other countries in the months leading to the games in August. During this ‘pause’, there was a let-up in the ill treatment of the country’s Jewish population, though those incarcerated in concentration camps beyond the public gaze were not so lucky.
Reynolds’ sidelining at the Mail continued during this time, with Price taking charge of the paper’s coverage of events in the Rhineland. Soon afterwards, Reynolds went away for several weeks. He took an increasing number of trips away from Germany from the middle part of the decade onwards. The increasing oppression was too much. ‘To live in Germany during these years was to look on, powerless to help, while a friend was being slowly suffocated,’ he wrote. ‘To escape, if only for a time, and breathe free air became the aim of all.’361
Reynolds’s job had previously restricted his chances of escape. But a unique opportunity arose in the spring of 1936 when the Nazi-designed Hindenburg airship was making its maiden voyage across the Atlantic. He did not manage to get a ticket for the westward flight from Germany to the American town of Lakehurst in New Jersey, but he had a place for the return journey in May 1936. He could therefore extend his holiday by taking a more leisurely route to America on a transatlantic liner. This was his first trip to America. The return trip on the Hindenburg was the newly built airship’s first eastward crossing of the Atlantic. There were over a hundred passengers aboard the gigantic drifting structure, more than half of whom were its crew. Alongside Reynolds were journalists from Germany, Britain and America as well as Nazi officials and diplomats and other specially invited guests.
The crossing took more than two days and was a triumph for Germany. During the Olympics in August, the airship was used to highlight Germany’s recent technological achievements and it also made trips over Britain, emblazoned with Nazi insignia on its tail. It seemed to represent the stunning innovation and powerful personality of the Third Reich. Just a year later the Hindenburg dream ended in flames when the airship crashed in New Jersey, killing all on board, but it was a powerful propaganda tool for the Nazis in 1936.
The Olympics passed successfully in August. The Guardian was among the voices outside Germany calling for an international boycott of the games, but the campaign was not strong enough. The presence of sporting representatives from other nations in Germany was another victory for Hitler, seeming to validate his regime. He put on a show and presented to the world an image of a united and powerful Germany. Despite the friendlier face the Nazis demonstrated at the games, journalists continued to fear for their safety. This was a worry not just for correspondents living permanently in Berlin but also for visitors. Westbrook Pegler, an American sports reporter over for the games, expressed fears in 1936 of being snatched by the Gestapo as a result of his reports.362
The Daily Mail trio of Price, Rothermere and Harmsworth continued to press home the point that a strong Germany was essential to thwart the spread of communism in Europe. After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, which brought fears of a leftist revolution in that country, their anxiety rose. ‘Although Bolshevism has made progress in France and Spain, Hitler’s rearmament of Germany has confronted it in Central Europe with a new and formidable barrier,’ Price wrote in September 1936.363 In the same article he says Britain should remain neutral in the event of a European war between fascist and communist countries. But his sympathies were clear.
Later in September, David Lloyd George, the former British Prime Minister, used the pages of the Daily Express to write a long and glowing account of Hitler and Germany following a visit to the country. ‘The idea of a Germany intimidating Europe with a threat that its irresistible army might march across frontiers forms no part of the new vision,’ Lloyd George wrote. ‘German hegemony in Europe, which was the aim and dream of the old pre-war militarism, is not even on the horizon of Nazism.’364 Vansittart, Churchill and others in the emerging anti-appeasement brigade read the words with horror.
In October, Hitler’s new appointment as British ambassador, Joachim von Ribbentrop, arrived in London. One of Hitler’s closest and most trusted lieutenants, Ribbentrop had joined the Nazi ranks relatively late. He had been a successful businessman and was first introduced to Hitler in the late 1920s. The new man immediately caused a sensation by greeting King Edward VIII with a Nazi salute. So desperate was Ribbentrop to get his son into Eton that he canvassed the editor of The Times, Geoffrey Dawson. Finding no success there, he even asked Whitehall’s chief opponent of appeasement, Lord Vansittart, for help. It was to no avail. The headmaster resisted all his efforts.
Ribbentrop would be an ambassador of a kind not seen before by polite society in Britain. Voigt criticised Ribbentrop from the start, calling him ‘an ambassador who is only here by fits and starts, who is more concerned to teach this country what its policy ought to be than to inform himself what its policy is’.365 Voigt had continued with his probing reports on Germany throughout 1936. Among British foreign correspondents of the era, few were regarded more highly. ‘He had been a Berlin correspondent, understood and hated all its works, and was determined to see that others understood it too and took steps to bring about its downfall,’ wrote Shiela Grant Duff, his apprentice in the Saar.366 ‘The Manchester Guardian was consistently better informed about German realities than any other newspaper,’ the BBC’s John Simpson wrote in his later history.367 This was largely because of Voigt. He was never expelled from Germany – his swift withdrawal from Berlin in 1933 deprived the Nazis of the chance – yet he had continued to rile them since his departure from Paris to London amid rumours of a Gestapo plot. He emerges as one of the heroes of British journalism in this period, railing at the approach to Germany taken by the newspaper he reported for. Despite some constraints he offered some of the best reports on what life behind the Nazi curtain was actually like.
The year ended with a grim development for the foreign press contingent in Berlin. Karl Robson, the Morning Post’s reporter, was suddenly given three days to leave Germany by Nazi authorities. He was told that if he defied the order he would be expelled, along with his pregnant wife and child. He had already been warned that the authorities considered his reports unfriendly to Germany. But the official justification they gave for his expulsion appeared relatively minor: his report that the German Foreign Office had not been convinced of the innocence of a German engineer arrested in Russia. It was a flimsy excuse for an expulsion and suggests it had been a long time coming. They would have used any excuse to expel Robson after he attacked Goebbels as ‘the biggest organiser of deception the world has ever seen’. But doing so at the time, nine months earlier, would have proven controversial given the heightened tensions over the Rhineland. So the Nazis chose a quieter moment, once the crisis had passed and the Olympics were finished, when the world was distracted by the emerging story of the abdication crisis in Britain. The plan was calculated, and largely worked in terms of minimising the impact of the expulsion. A small report in the Chicago Tribune reported that ‘Robson, who spent three years in Berlin, is the sixteenth member of the Association of the Foreign Press to be ordered to leave Germany since the Nazis assumed power.’368 The crackdown on criticism was accelerating.
- CHAPTER XII -
‘THE BEST CORRESPONDENT HERE LEFT THIS EVENING’
By the fourth anniversary of Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, his Reichstag speech at the end of January had become a closely watched annual tradition. He would stand, back straight and eyes wild, to boast of German might while assailing other European countries on grounds that shifted every year. The foreign correspondents in Berlin had learned by now that Hitler’s words were not a reliable indicator of how he would act in future weeks and months. Too many promises had been broken for that.
His speech to the Reichstag at the start of 1937 announced that Germany’s territorial ambitions were satisfied and the ‘period of surprises’ was over. Ebbutt of The Times had correctly predicted the speech would ‘be in general of a soothing nature calculated to keep public opinion abroad, especially in Great Britain, occupied for some weeks or even months arguing about its merits and meaning’.369 The accuracy of his foresight was a product of his long years of experience in Berlin. In 1937, he marked the tenth anniversary of his appointment as the main Germany correspondent of The Times. He was still relatively young, having celebrated his forty-third birthday four days before Hitler’s speech. Ebbutt’s dark view of Hitler meant he expected the coming years to be the most important of his time as a reporter in Germany.
Reporting on Hitler Page 17