Reporting on Hitler

by Wainewright, Will;

  Another journalist facing a battle who showed commendable independence of spirit in the days after Munich was Arthur Mann, the editor of the influential Conservative-leaning Yorkshire Post newspaper. He was a man ahead of his time. He had quietly rejected two offers of a knighthood from Stanley Baldwin in 1923 and 1929, believing that they would undermine his independence as a newspaperman. Owners and editors of other Conservative newspapers had no such qualms. He showed a similarly independent attitude in criticising the government’s policy of appeasement in the 1930s despite objections from the newspaper’s owner, Rupert Beckett.497

  The tension between Mann and Beckett, who expected his editor to support the government of the day, especially if it was Conservative, hit a fresh peak after Munich. Mann persistently tried to voice opposition, drawing the ire of Chamberlain and other government figures in London. ‘I believe that most editors follow a golden rule not to be in close social relationships with ministers of the crown,’ Mann later said during a BBC radio broadcast. ‘For as journalists they may be called upon to criticise them.’498 At the time of the Munich Agreement he put these words into practice.

  In Berlin, the days after the Munich Agreement were fraught. Reynolds could not believe that Chamberlain had struck a deal so injurious to Czechoslovakia without inviting them to join the discussions. He considered resigning, but hesitated. His job required him to remain in Berlin and report on the unfolding drama. Hitler wasted no time in ordering his army across the border into the Sudetenland.

  Reynolds accompanied the first detachment of German troops to cross the Czech border and reported on 3 October that ‘German troops are tonight still taking peaceful possession of the territory ceded to Germany by Czechoslovakia.’499 Appeasement critics in London mourned the news. ‘Today they march in. Poor Czechoslovakia! I wouldn’t mind so much if I thought we would learn the lesson – and arm, arm, arm!’ Voigt wrote in his diary.500

  The next day Reynolds was in the Bohemian region of Egerland to report on Hitler’s speech. ‘Never again shall this land be torn away from the Reich,’ Hitler told a large crowd.501 These reports were the last series of dispatches Reynolds sent from Germany. He knew in his heart he could not go on reporting on the events for a newspaper that remained so uncritical. He started to plan his departure from Berlin.

  - CHAPTER XVI -

  BROKEN GLASS

  Take the number 41 bus from the centre of Bedford and you will soon find yourself in the picturesque village of Turvey. It is surrounded by pretty English countryside, and the thirteenth-century church of All Saints stands proudly at its heart. Less visible is the Monastery of Christ Our Saviour, tucked away just off the main road into the village. It is home to a small order of Benedictine monks who worship five times a day, quietly and peacefully preserving an ancient way of living at odds with the noise and tumult of modern life.

  The eldest monk there is Herbert Kaden, an extraordinary man born a German Jew in Dresden in 1921. He had fled to Britain in 1938 with his mother and joined relatives, while they were still able to escape. He subsequently became a Catholic and, years later, a monk. I met him for the first time in February 2015, one month after his ninety-fourth birthday. ‘We don’t normally celebrate birthdays here, but made an exception on this occasion,’ he reflected with a grin.502 Tracking Kaden down had not been easy, but he was the first person I was able to interview who had personally known Reynolds.

  On moving to Britain, Kaden and his mother had lived at 3 Belvoir Terrace in Cambridge, next door to the house that Reynolds later lived in when he returned from Germany. The pair had spoken several times and Reynolds’s sisters, Kathleen and Marjorie, took Kaden to his first Catholic church service in December 1939. It was the first Midnight Mass of the war. Seventy-six years on, his memory pencil-sharp, Kaden vividly recalled stories from his youth before giving me a tour of the monastery. Bald, slightly built and with a bushy white beard, Kaden walked spryly through the grounds, using his wooden staff more as a propulsion device than for support. It was a struggle to keep up.

  His observations and recollections proved useful in the writing of this book, not just when it came to the Reynolds family. His memories of growing up a Jew in Nazi Germany provided a haunting picture of the harsh circumstances facing the Jewish community under Hitler. One of many low moments came when Kaden and his mother were evicted from their flat. ‘The landlord said, “I am sorry but I have to give you notice, as you are Jewish.” We tried to find other lodgings in the town, very naively. When my mother told them we were Jewish, they wouldn’t take us,’ he recalled.503 His uncle eventually persuaded them to leave Germany – in the nick of time, as it transpired.

  Others were not so lucky. Life for the Jewish population the Kaden family left behind in Germany was already difficult, but conditions plunged to a new low in November 1938 with the events of Kristallnacht. It was the most serious outbreak of violence against the country’s Jewish population yet. Persecution of the Jews had caused almost 150,000 to emigrate from Germany between 1933 and 1938,504 but the majority of the country’s Jews had stayed – some were unable to leave, while many remained in the belief their oppression would not worsen. On Kristallnacht their worst fears were realised.

  The violence that began on the night of 9 November was precipitated by an attack on a member of the German Embassy in Paris by a seventeen-year-old Polish Jew, Herschel Grynszpan. The diplomat died of gunshot wounds and the result was a pogrom quietly encouraged by the German authorities. Its impact was brutal. The glass fronts of Jewish shops were destroyed, leading to the brutality being given a name – ‘the Night of Broken Glass’ – which almost trivialises the violence of events. One hundred Jews died as homes and temples were razed to the ground. About 20,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps.

  Goebbels ordered the rioters to cease but it had little impact, with the violence continuing for a second night. Reynolds witnessed the brutality and the unwillingness of police and firefighters to stem the disorder and destruction. In the days that followed, he heard several Berliners joke that Jews were re-opening their shops so that rioters could swap the plundered goods they had stolen. Reynolds found it difficult to get an accurate picture of the level of violence. ‘News of such crimes is not published by the German papers, and it was only little by little that one formed a picture of the horror of those November nights.’505

  He spoke to one woman whose house had been broken into by three men, two wearing Nazi uniforms, in the middle of the night. ‘They threw over the wardrobe and smashed everything within their reach,’ she said. ‘And then they took my husband away.’506 The man was taken to a concentration camp before returning ten days later, feeling too threatened and intimidated to speak about what had happened. In another instance, Reynolds heard about brave German parents who had been harangued by their children for sheltering a Jewish couple from the violence. Only narrowly had they convinced their offspring – who were ‘ardent Nazis and Storm Troopers’ – not to denounce them to the authorities.507

  For Reynolds, the events were proof of the depravity of Hitler’s regime. ‘The murder [in Paris] gave the German government the long-desired occasion for carrying out its plan for totally crippling the Jewish minority,’ he wrote, ‘completing the process of cutting them off from the rest of the nation and of depriving them of the means of gaining a livelihood.’508 After years of observing steadily rising levels of state oppression towards Germany’s Jews, Reynolds knew exactly how calculating Hitler had been to achieve his latest and most effective victory against them. Tens of thousands of young men were ‘primed with tales of a conspiracy of the Jews of the world against the German people’ and then ‘sent into the streets of the towns of Germany to ravish, destroy and terrify’. After this, ‘laws, as cruel as the laws by which Elizabeth condemned the Catholics of England to a life of fear and seclusion, could be published and made known to the world’.509

  The assassination in Paris and subsequent anti-Jewish r
ioting gave the Nazis the pretext they needed to act. This much was clear from the menacing statement of intent that accompanied Goebbels’s call for the rioting to end. ‘Jewry fired on the German people in Paris. The German Government will reply to this in a legal but in a hard way. Laws and decrees which settle the question are to be expected.’510

  ‘Hard’ was an understatement. The subsequent decrees issued by Göring made it almost impossible to exist as a Jew in Germany. The first decree barred Jews from selling their goods and services in markets and other public arenas. ‘Thus, thousands were doomed to beggary in a morning,’ Reynolds wrote.511 Even his dentist was barred from practising, due to his Jewish grandparents of which he became aware only when attempting to prove his Aryan descent. That dentist had himself replaced Reynolds’s previous dentist, also a Jew, who had wisely chosen to move to America at the start of the Nazi reign of persecution.

  Other decrees forced Jews to pay punishing fines and banned them from making insurance claims after the damage they had suffered during Kristallnacht. They were stopped from visiting certain areas of Berlin. Reynolds was damning about how the wider German population had reacted to the oppression. ‘The German people has not displayed the heroic qualities required to resist a policy that is condemned as unjust by a large majority of the population.’512 He felt judges, employers and police were all to blame for acceding too easily, or even enthusiastically, to the Nazi will. During these bleak days, Reynolds made the final decision to leave Berlin. ‘To look on, helpless, at the suffering inflicted on innocent people, was to lose all joy in life.’513

  Rothay (far left) with friends in Berlin in 1938, pictured by Anthony Hewson. His time in Germany was nearing an end.

  After striking a bullish and supportive tone towards Hitler and the Nazis for most of the 1930s, the Daily Mail’s reporting on Kristallnacht marked a new departure for the paper. The brutality was too flagrant to turn a blind eye. The paper’s news pages described the events in a straight fashion, with a special late edition reporting ‘Anti-Jew riots in Germany’ the day after the first night of violence. In the days that followed, headlines included:

  ‘Jew-baiters defy Goebbels’ order’

  ‘Jewish shops’ stock hurled into street’

  ‘Nazis threaten to ration Jews’ food’

  ‘1,000 Jews sent to gaol camp’

  ‘German Jews to pay £250 each’

  On Sunday 14 November, five days after the start of Kristallnacht, came a strident editorial, ‘The World Protests’, which struck a different tone from previous columns.514 The contrast with the newspaper’s support for the Munich Agreement and prior lack of criticism towards Germany and Hitler is striking.

  ‘The world is appalled by the crushing nature of the new penalties imposed on the Jews in Germany,’ the leader said. ‘Their disabilities were already so heavy that it seemed impossible that their condition could be worsened. Now they are to be denied not only freedom of movement and opportunities for advancement but almost the right to live.’ It sounded like something Reynolds would have written himself, so closely did the sentiment reflect his own feelings. ‘To punish a helpless minority of 600,000 people for the act of an unbalanced youth is to outrage the name of justice … Christendom cannot shut its eyes to this wholesale oppression.’ It ends by imploring the Nazi leadership to exercise restraint and control the rioters responsible for the violence. ‘Even now, hopes were expressed last night that Germany might yet heed the call of humanity and show moderation – and mercy.’515

  The stinging editorial echoed the united response of the British press in general, which was uniformly critical of the events of Kristallnacht. The American ambassador returned to Washington in protest. But the Daily Mail’s change of tone came too late to convince Reynolds to stay. His relationship with the newspaper had deteriorated too substantially. Ageing and tired of life in Germany, by the end of 1938 he was ready to come home. As his disapproval of the Munich Agreement had shown, Reynolds knew that Hitler’s near-total dominance in the country and increasing confidence on the world stage made war inevitable. He continued to lament Britain’s policy of appeasement.

  Depressed, Reynolds battled to keep warm through yet another harsh German winter. His palatial Tiergarten flat was ideal for parties but hard to heat. He was tired of Berlin. By 1939 he had spent seventeen years in the city, for which he had initially felt no particular fondness. To him it could not compete with the cuisine of France or the Catholic splendour of Warsaw, and their contrast with the German capital grew in his mind as the storm clouds continued to darken. ‘I felt an ever-increasing weight of oppression,’ he wrote. ‘The gaiety that nature had given me was being quenched in the gloom around me.’516

  Bitterness and regret consumed his final months there. At sixty-six, his years were advancing, and it saddened him to think he was leaving and his career ending at such a dismal time. He later gave the following account of everyday life at the time:

  Bread was grey and disagreeable, giving people indigestion. Last Christmas [1938], the German people had no oranges, no coffee, and the less one investigated eggs the better. Butter was rationed – and that was in a time of peace. But they must not grumble in Germany: an overheard grumble meant a hand on the shoulder and a concentration camp. At that time every penny was being diverted to the war machine. One could not get a yard of decent cloth in the whole of Berlin.517

  Reynolds was desperate for the home comforts of England. ‘Who is contented in Germany after six years of Hitler’s rule?’ he asked. ‘The number, judging from conversations I have had with people of every class, is small.’518 He left in February 1939. Mystery surrounds the exact circumstances of his departure. He was not expelled by the Nazis – the Daily Mail was one of the few foreign newspapers whose correspondents could rest easy on that front.

  But he certainly left under a cloud. There were suggestions in a history of the Daily Mail written in 1998 that he was dismissed by the newspaper. Homosexuality was given as the likely reason.519 It is possible that a journalist would be fired on such grounds in light of the attitudes and laws of the era. The truth of the claim in respect to Reynolds, who remained a bachelor his whole life, is unknown. He referenced girlfriends on occasion, but it is impossible to know the full truth. Had he been gay he would have had to be immensely discreet, as he was in all things. Perhaps more important is that, by the start of 1939, Reynolds and the newspaper were more than happy to part ways. It is possible that after the Munich Agreement his hostility to the newspaper’s favourable attitude to Hitler spilled into open argument with the office in London. With homosexuality a crime, could such a rumour have provided a convenient excuse for him to be pressured out of the newspaper? No evidence remains to suggest this was the case, and at sixty-six he was past retirement age. Yet his decision to later resume work as a foreign correspondent for another newspaper suggests he was not ready to stop.

  Reynolds packed his belongings and prepared to depart. It was not an easy task to get permission to send his many books and household goods to Britain. Receiving permission to even leave the country was no easy business, though Reynolds had a much easier time than Germany’s remaining Jewish population, who had to retrieve the passports they had been forced to give up. In some instances, Reynolds wrote, ‘emigrants are not infrequently stripped at the frontier on the pretext that they may be concealing money or jewels’.520 A customs official came to Reynolds’s flat to watch his belongings being packed away. ‘So many people are leaving Germany,’ he said, ‘that we cannot cope with the work.’521

  Reynolds, who was replaced by his assistant Izzard, was about to take on a fresh challenge. On his departure from Berlin he had already begun planning a book about his time in Germany. He wanted to reveal the full truth as he saw it, without the restraints imposed by working for the Daily Mail. It was his chance to reveal his true views about Hitler and the Nazis. After nearly two decades abroad, it was with some relief and indeed enthusiasm that he returned
to Britain.

  ‘It is pleasant to be in England again,’ Reynolds wrote, continuing:

  Here men do not turn their heads to see whether anybody is within earshot before daring to criticise a decision made by the government. No nervous visitor throws his coat over the telephone on my desk before beginning to talk. Fear of the denunciator does not poison life. No victim of persecution comes to me to unfold a tale of undeserved misery and to implore my help to get to some friendlier land. I am not filled with anxiety by news of the arrest of a colleague or friend.522

  The first signs of spring greeted Reynolds on his arrival in Britain, further boosting his mood at being home and out of Germany. He knew war was coming, but at least in Britain he could relax with family and friends he had been separated from for so long. Soon after his arrival he was invited to speak to students at Oxford University. He told them in his speech that he firmly believed that they would soon be fighting against Hitler.523

  Reynolds considered settling in Canterbury, but ended up returning to his university roots at Cambridge. He lived on the edge of the town with his three surviving siblings, Kathleen, Ronald and Marjorie. ‘This house is like a London house with a drawing-room upstairs,’ he said in a letter to a relative. ‘We have quite a big garden, with flowers, vegetables and fruit, which is a great pleasure. There one might be in the country, while actually we are close to my old college, Pembroke.’524

  Reynolds’s first months back in Britain were a soothing contrast to life in Berlin. For the first time in years he could relax, though he remained pained by memories of his time abroad. ‘The things seen and heard in the years in Germany cannot be banished from the mind.’525 His new quieter surroundings, and their contrast with the bustling urban pace of Berlin, were essential for the task he now set himself: writing a full and uncensored account of the Nazi rise to power. This was therapeutic in one way – at last he could give a true account of life in Berlin, with editors far less likely to interfere than at the Daily Mail. He started the task of finding a publisher for his book.