Reporting on Hitler

by Wainewright, Will;

  Nazi flags hang from a building overlooking a square in the German capital, 1937. (PA-1456 Thomas Neumann, The National Archives of Norway)

  Hitler’s speech was greeted by a mixed reception from newspapers in Britain. A combination of optimism and caution prevailed, typified by a Guardian editorial asserting that since Hitler ‘says he is for cooperation, he should be taken at his word’.370 Voigt was more cautious in his diplomatic correspondence column the next day, which reported an emerging view within the British Foreign Office. ‘Second thoughts only confirm the view taken here that Herr Hitler’s speech is entirely negative as far as relations between Germany and the rest of the world are concerned.’371 By this time Voigt had established strong links with senior figures at the Foreign Office, from Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden downwards. His closest link was Lord Vansittart, who continued his efforts behind closed doors to convince British diplomats and politicians to share his anti-Nazi views. Eden and Vansittart had a useful disciple at the Foreign Office in Rex Leeper, the department’s head of news, who briefed journalists and forged close links with the small but influential band of diplomatic correspondents in London.

  On 3 February, the News Chronicle’s Vernon Bartlett wrote a front-page story after returning from his first visit to Berlin for six months. He did not share the cautious optimism of others in the newspaper industry. ‘There is a virtual inevitability of war,’ he wrote, and Germans as a whole now saw war ‘as one of the few certain events of an uncertain future.’372 This was a candid assessment based on Bartlett’s reporting on the ground, rather than simple coverage of Hitler’s pacifying words to the Reichstag. The report helped cement the News Chronicle’s position as one of the two newspapers, alongside the Guardian, that most infuriated the Nazis.

  It was the turn of The Times to aggravate the Nazis in April, when the newspaper was the first to report on Luftwaffe involvement in the bombing of the defenceless Basque town of Guernica. The Spanish Civil War had started the previous year, with socialists challenging the iron rule of General Franco’s nationalists. Mussolini and Hitler allied themselves to Franco and their air forces were deployed in the controversial Guernica bombing. The Nazis reacted furiously to the initial (accurate) Times report, sending a wave of anti-British sentiment through the state-controlled German media. There was concern within the newspaper’s headquarters at Printing House Square that it had been over-hasty with its first report, but other newspapers in Britain soon corroborated it. The German overreaction, wrote Ebbutt, ‘suggests that the path to an understanding will be remote indeed while Germany remains under the influence of her present political prejudices’.373

  In a stirring editorial, headlined ‘The Times Bombs Guernica’, the newspaper hit back against German claims. ‘What is the destiny of the world in which no responsible organ of the press can tell the simple truth without incurring charges of Machiavellian villainy?’ The Times asked.374 This strong public response was quite an answer to the newspaper’s growing band of critics accusing them of going soft on Germany. These attacks on The Times were related to its editorial stance, rather than the strong on-the-ground reports from Ebbutt. But he was himself unhappy.

  Since returning to Germany after a bout of sickness in 1933, Ebbutt had reported valiantly on Nazi excesses despite fears for his safety, which were first relayed to him at that time. He continued to socialise with other foreign correspondents at the Taverne restaurant in Berlin, and William Shirer noted in his diary that Ebbutt was usually the central member of the party:

  Normally Norman Ebbutt presides, sucking at an old pipe the night long, talking and arguing in a weak, high-pitched voice, imparting wisdom, for he has been here a long time, has contacts throughout the government, party, churches and army, and has a keen intelligence. Of late he has complained to me in private that The Times does not print all he sends, that it does not want to hear too much of the dark side of Nazi Germany and apparently has been captured by the pro-Nazis in London. He is discouraged and talks of quitting.375

  Ebbutt’s fears centred on Geoffrey Dawson, the newspaper’s editor. A proud Yorkshireman, Dawson had edited The Times throughout the 1930s. He had enjoyed a long career in newspapers, rising to prominence in the trade as a young man with his appointment as editor of the Johannesburg Star. His love for the British Empire was sustained by an overriding belief in its power to civilise and improve the lives of those in other parts of the world. To Dawson, being born British was a greater cause for pride even than his Yorkshire roots. ‘The British Empire is the most powerful bulwark in the world today against the spread of international discord,’ he wrote in a Times leading article in May 1934. Maintaining the strength of the empire ‘is by far the greatest and most practical contribution which British statesmanship can make to the welfare of mankind’.376 Such comments were far from atypical.

  This ruggedly built countryman had already edited The Times between 1912 and 1919 when he agreed, after the death of its proprietor Lord Northcliffe in 1922, to take up the role for a second time. During his first spell in charge he had been unhappy with interventions made by Northcliffe, who had great power in government circles during the First World War – but the press baron’s death offered a clean break. Dawson’s independence under the newspaper’s new owners established, he began a nineteen-year editorship that would prove one of the most controversial in the newspaper’s long history.

  Dawson enjoyed being close to those in power. In the late 1930s he spoke regularly to Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, and to Neville Chamberlain, who rose to the premiership in May 1937. Dawson was a regular lunch companion of Lord Halifax, with whom he shared a background of Yorkshire, Eton and Oxford. The men shared similar outlooks on all manner of things – from the supremacy of the British Empire and Conservative principles to most foreign policy issues. Dawson viewed these relationships as an important part of his job, as the intelligence gleaned from his network of powerful contacts helped form the positions taken by his newspaper.

  To critics, however, these contacts exposed the newspaper’s lack of independence. They thought the independence from proprietorial influence that Dawson had fought for was fatally undermined by his closeness to the ruling elite. The reputation of The Times for being the newspaper in Britain most likely to echo the government’s viewpoint was well-established by the 1930s. But Dawson’s approach only reinforced this reputation, much to the irritation of staff. In government circles, Dawson’s fawning relationship with Halifax was ridiculed. ‘Dawson eats out of his hand,’ Oliver Harvey, private secretary to Lord Halifax in the Foreign Office, noted in his diary towards the end of the decade.377

  For the influence it carried with regimes abroad and within government circles at home, The Times is widely judged to have been the most important British newspaper of the 1930s. Its circulation rose steadily throughout the decade, from 187,000 in 1930 to 204,000 in 1939. The Daily Mail may have been read by several times that number, but in terms of power and influence, the ‘quality’ Times was several leagues removed from the ‘popular’ Mail. Times dispatches on Germany and other major areas of foreign policy were read with interest around the globe.

  Ebbutt had long thought his articles were meddled with and suspected, rightly, that the paper’s leadership in London was keen to appease Germany. A letter written by Dawson soon after the Guernica affair to H. G. Daniels, a senior journalist who served as The Times’s man in Berlin before Ebbutt, revealed his keenness to have a smooth relationship with Germany. This desire impacted the newspaper’s content. ‘It would interest me to know precisely what it is in The Times that has produced this antagonism in Germany,’ Dawson wrote. ‘I did my utmost, night after night, to keep out of the paper anything that might hurt their sensibilities.’378

  Coote, the Times leader-writer who had been dismayed by his paper’s response to Hitler’s Rhineland action, was increasingly alarmed by events in the newsroom. He later remarked that Dawson’s letter to Daniels was a macabre example of
the blind eye appeasers were willing to turn to bloodshed and suffering in the pursuit of Hitler’s friendship. ‘Not only is the tone plaintive – almost whining – but also it would not be gathered from the wording that the bombing of Guernica was a revolting horror,’ Coote wrote. ‘It was carried out by German airmen lent to Franco in the Spanish Civil War, against an undefended town; there was much damage and great loss of life. This was a scandalous butchery.’379

  Coote remarked on a second letter sent by Dawson, this time to Lord Lothian, where he comments on inserting words and lines to soothe the Germans. ‘Geoffrey Dawson spent much time in keeping out of the paper anything that might offend the Germans,’ Coote observed.380 He felt that Dawson’s adulation of the British Empire and friendships with senior politicians blinkered his perspective.

  Feelings and friendships caused Geoffrey Dawson to disregard and indeed to distort the dispatches which he received from Norman Ebbutt, The Times correspondent in Berlin; in addition to disregarding the minor screams of people like myself. He really ought to have known better.381

  By the middle of 1937, Coote was only being asked to write leading articles that dealt with British rearmament – the subject of relations with Germany was entrusted to other writers. Rearmament was strongly favoured by Dawson. He had a similar attitude to Rothermere at the Daily Mail – pursue a friendship with Germany, but be sure to be well-armed just in case. Coote called British rearmament ‘Dawson’s insurance against disaster arising from his pro-German policy’.382

  In Berlin, Ebbutt heard rumours of these newsroom splits. He had other, more pressing matters to immediately deal with, however. Goebbels was a particularly vehement opponent of Ebbutt’s reporting – a dangerous foe to have in the wilds of Nazi Germany. His disdain for The Times and its well-connected reporter had taken a further downward turn during the Guernica affair. The Nazis took special exception to Times reports, no doubt largely because of the newspaper’s unique global influence. In the wake of the Guernica reports, anti-Times sentiment reached fevered levels in the German press. The country’s media embarked on a savage campaign against the newspaper, pointing out, in all seriousness, that ‘Times’ spelt backwards is ‘Semit’ and alleging that the newspaper was secretly pursuing a pro-Jewish crusade. Such desperation in Germany to cast aspersions on the motives of Times journalists vindicated the newspaper’s reporting. However, the self-incriminating letters of Dawson and the conflict with some staff members were damaging.

  Ebbutt remained in Berlin. Though Goebbels was sorely tempted to remove him after the Guernica affair, the expulsion of a reporter from as eminent a publication as The Times would have made international news and drawn more attention to the bloodshed. He was therefore one of the thousand or so British citizens invited to the Berlin Embassy in June as the new British ambassador, Sir Nevile Henderson, threw a party marking King George VI’s birthday. About two-thirds of the British expatriates living in Germany turned up at the embassy, which was situated on the Wilhelmstrasse – described as ‘Downing Street on a larger scale’ by Henderson.383 The high turnout of British citizens was partly the result of curiosity; few of them had met the new ambassador and they wanted to get his measure. The opportunity to sip champagne and gossip in the grand reception rooms on the ground floor was too good to miss. For Henderson, too, the chance to meet British subjects in Berlin and glean their views on events in Germany was a great one. He enjoyed himself. ‘The British colony in Berlin was an extremely poor one, and I do not think that any party which I ever gave provided me with greater pleasure than that one,’ he wrote.384

  Henderson was a 54-year-old veteran of the diplomatic service. Tall and lean, with a long face and thick moustache, he was a debonair individual, rarely seen without a dark red carnation in his buttonhole. He had joined the service in 1905 and his first junior posting was to the embassy in St Petersburg, where he would have known Reynolds. But there is no evidence that the pair got on – and Henderson had a distinctly different view about the Nazis from Reynolds in the late 1930s.

  Henderson had limited knowledge of his new brief but sought quickly to master it. He chose to travel back from Argentina on a German passenger ship in order to learn the language. He used the time to read Mein Kampf for the first time. It struck him as ‘a remarkable production,’ he said, ‘on the part of a man whose education and political experience appeared to have been as slight, on this showing, as Herr Hitler’s’.385 It was a somewhat ambiguous comment to make about a book in which Hitler laid his anti-Semitism bare. Rumbold, Henderson’s predecessor-but-one as ambassador, had condemned it as evidence of Hitler’s bad character as early as 1933.

  Henderson arrived in Berlin on 30 April 1937. Within a few days he had heard Hitler speak for the first time. ‘His speech contained a scathing reference or so to the effete democracies, particularly Britain, against whom there was, as usual, a press campaign raging at the time,’ wrote Henderson, who was impressed. Though he found Hitler’s voice to be ‘harsh and unsympathetic’, he thought Germany’s leader had the ‘gift of rhetorical exhortation’.386 Henderson was impressed, too, by Hitler’s achievements in office. ‘He had restored to Germany her self-respect, and recreated orderliness out of the chaos and distress which had followed her defeat in 1918.’387 As his offhand attitude to Mein Kampf made clear, Henderson found Hitler’s achievements far more worthy of comment than his faults.

  A short time after his arrival in Berlin, Henderson gave a speech to assorted members of the Nazi leadership, including Himmler. ‘In England,’ he said:

  far too many people have an erroneous conception of what the National-Socialist regime really stands for. Otherwise they would lay less stress on the Nazi leadership and much more emphasis on the great social experiment which is being tried out in this country. Not only would they criticise less, but they might learn useful lessons.388

  This may have been acceptable to say when Hitler took power in 1933, but by the time Henderson assumed his role in Berlin four years later, many observers saw the Nazi reality clearly enough. To speak of an ‘erroneous conception’ at this stage may have been a clumsy attempt by Henderson to ingratiate himself with his hosts. More likely it reveals where his own sympathies lay. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Henderson did not mention this particular speech in his memoirs.

  By the summer of 1937, Ebbutt was exhausted. After a decade leading the Times’s reporting in Berlin, he was mentally and physically spent. Daniels had rejoined him by this time to lend a hand. Ebbutt continued to pay close attention to the fate of the church in Germany throughout the year as conditions for worshippers and the clergy worsened. His church reporting during the 1930s won him the admiration of Reynolds, whose job at the Daily Mail, with its focus on sensational news, precluded him from focusing on an issue close to his heart. He was impressed by his rival. Ebbutt was a ‘careful writer, against whom a charge of reporting events in Germany inaccurately could not be brought,’ wrote Reynolds. ‘The tone of his dispatches was disliked and objection was taken to the copious information he gave of the persecution of the clergy, who were resisting the attempt to Nazify the Protestant Church.’389

  In July 1937 Martin Niemöller, a protestant clergyman who had initially welcomed the rise of the Third Reich, was arrested. His support for Hitler had quickly evaporated once the grim reality of life in Nazi Germany became clear. He became an outspoken critic as the Nazis tried to tighten their grip on the Christian church. He felt it personally: his phone was tapped by the Gestapo and he was arrested several times for speaking out. ‘The faith is in danger!’ Reynolds heard Niemöller declare at one of the pastor’s public meetings in Berlin that so annoyed the Nazis. ‘The words rang through the hall and thrilled the great audience,’ Reynolds wrote.390

  The latest arrest was greeted with uproar by British newspapers, including The Times. The News Chronicle and Guardian were also persistently vocal on the church issue in Germany. Later that month, Britain expelled three Nazi reporters from London on the g
rounds of espionage. It was the opportunity Goebbels had been waiting for. Nazi authorities swiftly requested Ebbutt’s withdrawal from Berlin in retaliation. The Times held firm at first but had no choice but to extract their reporter when Goebbels issued a formal expulsion order. For a newspaper as prestigious as The Times to have their reporter expelled was a momentous event and it made international news. ‘Norman Ebbutt of the London Times, by far the best correspondent here, left this evening,’ wrote Shirer in his diary on the evening of 16 August 1937. He continued:

  He was expelled, following British action in kicking out two or three Nazi correspondents in London, the Nazis seizing the opportunity to get rid of a man they’ve hated and feared for years because of his exhaustive knowledge of this country and of what was going on behind the scenes. The Times, which has played along with the pro-Nazi Cliveden set, never gave him much support and published only half of what he wrote, and indeed is leaving Ebbutt’s assistant, Jimmy Holburn, to continue with the office here.391

  Shirer and around fifty other foreign correspondents in Berlin gathered at Charlottenburg station to see Ebbutt off. They were warned not to – word had filtered through from the Nazi authorities that their presence would be considered an unfriendly act towards Germany. Shirer noted with amusement that some correspondents were too frightened to come, ‘including two well-known Americans’. It is not known whether Reynolds attended. The platform swarmed not only with foreign correspondents but also Gestapo agents. They took details of who had turned up and photographed them. But the reporters still managed to give the long-suffering Ebbutt a warm sendoff. Shirer said the Times man was ‘terribly highly-strung, but moved by our sincere, if boisterous, demonstration of farewell’.392