Events in Europe continued to accelerate. Chamberlain had resisted calls for a quicker pace of rearmament for fear of undermining the Munich Agreement. He did not want to rile Germany in any way. Warnings from the Secretary of State for Air, Sir Kingsley Wood, that the air force was ‘seriously deficient as compared with Germany’ were overruled.526 Not only did British ministers believe the agreement to be worth safeguarding, they were prepared to tolerate German air superiority as the price of its protection. Yet in the early months of 1939, Hitler was planning a move that would blow apart the Munich Agreement.
The News Chronicle, whose strong reporting and sharp criticism in the run-up to Munich had been blunted at the eleventh hour by the intervention of Walter Layton, its editor-in-chief, found its teeth again as the new year got underway. The author H. G. Wells wrote an article in which he described Hitler as a ‘certifiable lunatic’. This piece was the cause of considerable angst within Chamberlain’s government, which continued to be keenly sensitive on Germany’s behalf.527
They would have reacted with horror to the book that the Daily Telegraph’s Eric Gedye was in the final stages of writing at the start of 1939. Since his expulsion from Austria in March, he had been working on his anti-appeasement tome Fallen Bastions, which fiercely criticised the foreign policy of Neville Chamberlain. He had continued working for the Telegraph in Prague while writing the book, which was being published by Hodder & Stoughton in London. In the publisher’s 1939 spring list, the book was advertised as telling ‘the uncensored truth’. This did not go down well in the Telegraph’s London headquarters. At the start of 1939, the editor Arthur Watson recalled him at short notice to the office. An argument ensued, with Gedye accused of breaching his status as an impartial correspondent by writing the book. He was given six months’ pay and removed from the newspaper.528
Given that the Telegraph was one of the most fervent critics of appeasement, this attitude seems surprising. What may have drawn the wrath of the paper was the accusation, implicit in the ‘uncensored truth’ advert, that his dispatches were somehow meddled with and that the Telegraph prevented him telling the whole truth. It is ironic that his time with the paper ended in this way, for he was one of the few foreign correspondents whose reporting was not interfered with in some way when it came to Hitler and the Nazis. Gedye’s response to the affair was acerbic. The Telegraph editor had announced that his resignation had been agreed by mutual consent. ‘That,’ said Gedye, ‘is correct. It is equally correct that Herr Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia by “mutual arrangement” with President Hácha.’529
He returned to Prague and continued working there for the New York Times. He was at the eye of the storm when, in the middle of March, Hitler ordered his tanks over the Sudeten border and instructed his army to occupy the rest of Czechoslovakia. It was his most blatant and aggressive act to date, leaving the Munich Agreement in tatters. Chamberlain and Joseph Ball were playing golf when news came of the German invasion of Czechoslovakia.530
It was widely seen as the end of appeasement. Vernon Bartlett was hundreds of miles away from Prague, convalescing on the remote Scilly Isles off the coast of Cornwall, when Hitler acted. ‘The only real consolation about all this miserable business,’ he wrote, ‘is that the Prime Minister must be finding it very difficult to continue, under the attractive title of “appeasement”, a policy which is destroying all those freedoms which his and our ancestors fought to win.’531
This was the moment when the Daily Mail finally changed its attitude to Hitler. Until the Nazis moved against the rest of Czechoslovakia, Lord Rothermere’s paper had been arguing that British foreign policy in relation to Germany was working. ‘War was avoided last September by Mr Chamberlain. Nobody disputes that,’ it wrote in an editorial on 13 March, shortly before Hitler sent his army over the border towards Prague. ‘Today even his opponents have been forced to recognise that his policy of peace and security is working out along the right lines.’532
Just three days later the Mail was reporting on Chamberlain’s anger as he addressed the House of Commons. ‘The hushed and shaking words of the Prime Minister amounted to a bitter accusation that Herr Hitler, his fellow signatory at Munich, had broken at any rate the spirit of that agreement.’533 A day after this report the Mail declared in an editorial that ‘Hitler has killed Munich’. The paper’s support for the dictator was finally broken. ‘His historic aim of restoring German minorities to the Fatherland was understandable, though his methods may have been deplored,’ it continued. ‘But he has no sanction either in law or morality for this subjugation of a free and sovereign people.’534
The rest of the British press followed suit. To the newspapers which had previously felt able to offer him the benefit of the doubt, Hitler had revealed his true nature. The Observer editor James Garvin is the best example of this reversal in attitudes. He had been one of the biggest supporters of appeasement and argued that events in Czechoslovakia were of no concern to Britain. He had welcomed the Munich Agreement. But the Nazi entry into Prague finally disabused Garvin of the notion that Hitler could be negotiated with. He was thereafter transformed into one of Hitler’s foremost critics.
The Nazi capture of the rest of Czechoslovakia was swift. ‘The whole crisis had only lasted five days. Hitler had staged another of his lightening [sic] coups, and once more the world was left breathless,’ wrote Ambassador Henderson, with something approaching admiration.535 When the Germans arrived in Prague, Eric Gedye took shelter with two press colleagues in the British Embassy. They avoided arrest by the Gestapo and were permitted to leave Czechoslovakia a week later. He went on to work as Moscow correspondent for the New York Times.
Towards the end of March, Ian Colvin of the News Chronicle returned to London and met with Neville Chamberlain, Lord Halifax and other senior members of the government. He pressed on them the danger that Poland was now in. He believed a German strike against that country may be imminent. On the last day of March, in part as a result of these warnings, Chamberlain announced to the House of Commons that Britain would defend Poland if it was invaded by Germany. The chances of war, already high, became close to a racing certainty.
Price was present for the Daily Mail in Memel when the Nazis turned their attention to Lithuania. Standing alongside the Nazis leadership, Himmler turned to him and said: ‘With regard to the Jews, you English have had no experience of the danger that they constitute as a political and economic factor. It is a race against which we must defend ourselves.’536 The Nazis were already planning to extend their menacing regime over Jews to eastern Europe. New and even more sinister plans were being hatched.
The dangerous situation facing foreign correspondents in Berlin became almost impossible. Hugh Carleton Greene (the future director-general of the BBC and brother of the novelist Graham Greene), who had led the Telegraph’s reporting in Berlin since 1938, was expelled in May 1939. Later that month, Germany and Italy signed their Pact of Steel. Henderson continued his efforts in Berlin. Many newspapers in Britain thought the diplomat should not have returned to Germany after Kristallnacht, but he continued with his ill-starred attempts to tame the Nazi leadership.
During one meeting with Göring in the summer of 1939, he was distracted when the leading Nazi showed him a set of tapestries he proposed to hang in his country retreat at Karinhall. In an official dispatch, which was inadvertently made public, Henderson described them as ‘naked ladies’. Almost laughably, Henderson was subsequently distracted from his task by worries over the publication of this coarse word. He later wrote: ‘Had I anticipated that my despatch would ever be published, I should certainly have written “nude figures” in place of the cruder expression which I actually used.’537 Priorities, again, were skewed.
In June of 1939 Henderson held his annual party to mark the king’s birthday and just three or four hundred attended, less than a third of the number present two years earlier. Britons were leaving Berlin in advance of a likely war. ‘The whole general atmosph
ere in Berlin was one of utter gloom and depression,’ Henderson wrote.538 In July he tried to see Hitler, who was at Bayreuth attending a Wagner musical. ‘It was a complete failure. I had car trouble on the way down,’ wrote Henderson. Hitler had left by the time he arrived. ‘The sole satisfaction that I derived from Bayreuth was to hear a marvellous performance of The Valkyrie.’539
Criticism of Dawson and The Times policy on Germany persisted until virtually the outbreak of war, with other newspapers not missing an opportunity to attack their esteemed rival for its attachment to appeasement. Following the infamous Times editorial of 7 September 1938, The Week newsletter claimed it had been sent to the German Embassy for prior approval, prompting a rare legal threat from Dawson.540 Author and playwright J. B. Priestley did not let the Yorkshire background he shared with Dawson stop him writing this pointed attack in July 1939. ‘Nearly every day in The Times there are persuasive letters, from good addresses, telling us that it is all a slight misunderstanding, and that if we knew the Gestapo better (as we may do soon) we should discover that they are fine stout fellows.’541 The article so riled Dawson that Priestley was forced to make a ‘frank apology’ and the News Chronicle explained the article away, slightly unconvincingly, as ‘exuberant hyperbole’.
Even after the events of March 1939, Chamberlain continued to think Hitler was a man whose demands he could – and should – try to meet. ‘If dictators would have a modicum of patience,’ he wrote to his sister in July, ‘I can imagine that a way could be found of meeting German claims while safeguarding Poland’s independence and economic security.’542 A week later he told his sister that he thought ‘Hitler has concluded that we mean business and that the time is not ripe’ to go to war. ‘The longer the war is put off the less likely it is to come at all as we go on perfecting our defences and building up the defences of our allies. That is what Winston and Co. never seem to realise.’543 In the British press, one man hung on to the belief that a deal with Hitler could be done. Lord Kemsley was meeting Hitler in Berlin as late as August 1939 to try and strike an agreement and prevent war.
- CHAPTER XVII -
WHEN FREEDOM SHRIEKED
Reynolds was in Britain for almost all of 1939. It was his longest time in the country since the First World War. He appreciated the change of pace. It was relaxing to have respite from the pressure of following and breaking news after so many years. After six weeks sorting his affairs and finalising matters with the book’s publisher, Victor Gollancz, Reynolds began writing in April 1939, the month after Nazi tanks rolled into Prague. Anger at Hitler’s power-grab in Germany and the ensuing years of totalitarian rule was raw in his mind as he wrote.
Sir Victor Gollancz’s publishing house in London had released many books by foreign correspondents in the 1930s, including Vernon Bartlett’s Nazi Germany Explained in 1933, as well as works by promising up-and-coming writers such as George Orwell. As a Jew, Gollancz was especially interested in exposing the truth about the reality of life for Germany’s Jewish population. He relished the opportunity to publish a first-hand account of life in Weimar and Nazi Germany by a journalist such as Reynolds, whose politics were more liberal than the newspaper he had worked for. Reynolds could now write with freedom and did not have to worry about his book causing problems with an employer in the manner of Eric Gedye.
The process of collecting his thoughts each day as he wrote When Freedom Shrieked was therapeutic on one hand, but did not help ease the pain. Reynolds may have felt at home in Britain, but he was hardly at peace. Memories of his time in Germany haunted his sleep. As Cambridge sweated in the summer heat, Reynolds worked day and night to complete his 318-page book. He was too busy to write to some of his relatives until after he finished, informing one:
I have been tied to my desk since April writing this book, a horrid task. I had far too much material – to write easily about a foreign country one should visit for a month and come back with clear ideas, undisturbed by questioning and doubts.544
His work was interrupted at the start of September by the news that Hitler had ordered his army into Poland. Britain was at war. Germany’s invasion of Poland was no surprise to Reynolds. It added even more urgency to his task and allowed him to write in the book’s foreword, penned on 29 September:
The title of this book, suggested by a line of Thomas Campbell’s Pleasures of Hope, has proved to be more terribly appropriate than I could have foreseen when I chose it. Filled with distress at the failure of the heroic attempt of the Poles to loose themselves from the grasp of their oppressors, the poet wrote:
Hope for a season bade the world farewell,
And Freedom shriek’d – as Kosciusko fell.
As I wrote, I had in my ears the shriek of freedom across the plains of Germany. My work was almost at an end, when the tyrant who drove freedom out of Germany invaded his neighbours’ land. Again Polish heroes fought and fell; and again the shriek of freedom resounded through the world.
Champions of freedom have arisen: and we are at war with the enemy of the rights of man. I have not, however, found it necessary to alter or modify in a time of war what I have written in a time of peace.545
With Poland occupied, Reynolds’s tone against Germany hardened still further. ‘Germany must not merely be defeated, but punished for her atrocious cruelty. I am constantly thinking about the Poles who are being turned out of their homes,’ he wrote to a relative. Reynolds backed up his strong words with good deeds – over the course of 1939, he would host two refugees at his home in Cambridge, one Polish and one Russian.
For the handful of British correspondents remaining in Berlin, the coming of war marked the beginning of a desperate bid for safety. If they remained in Germany after war started they would be behind enemy lines and arrested if found. The Daily Mail’s Izzard and four of his colleagues from the press fled thirty-six hours before hostilities commenced. An already precarious existence was becoming a battle for survival.
Izzard, Selkirk Panton of the Express, Ewan Butler of The Times, Anthony Mann of The Telegraph and Ian Colvin of the News Chronicle boarded a train to Denmark. They would have preferred to head to Holland but the train journey was longer and they wanted to cross the German border as soon as possible. They stayed in the Hotel D’Angleterre in Copenhagen. ‘It was built around a courtyard. I was staying in a corner room and I could hear all the telephoning going on throughout the hotel,’ Izzard recalled. ‘I heard an American and he said, “Well, the war’s on,” and that’s how I found out the war had started.’546
From there he went to Amsterdam. Panton and Mann stayed on in Copenhagen and were arrested by the Germans when they invaded in April 1940. They were interned for the rest of the war on a cold island in the Baltic. A month later the Nazis invaded Holland. Izzard was on the last British ship out of the country when the German paratroopers started dropping. It was one of the most terrifying moments of his life.
Sefton Delmer was in Warsaw when the Nazis first bombed Poland at the start of September 1939. He was with Richard Mowrer of the Chicago Daily News (the nephew of Edgar Ansel Mowrer) and Jerzsy Bau, a Polish journalist. They came under poison gas attack and then drove south into Romania in an unofficial press convoy, behind a car containing Carleton Greene of the Telegraph, Willie Forrest of the News Chronicle and Patrick Maitland of The Times. Warsaw held out for another fortnight against the German army. Delmer felt shame for leaving too early and not reporting over the radio on their brave resistance, but he made amends by remaining in Paris the following June until the morning of the day the Germans marched in.
Reynolds monitored events from Cambridge. The city was transformed in the midst of war. Living next door to the Reynolds siblings at this time was Herbert Kaden, then a young German Jew still adjusting to a new life in Britain. Here he describes how Cambridge changed in just a few days:
All the young people were asked to fill sandbags and put them round the walls of the colleges. Women had to sew blackout curtains and we helped t
o put them up at Newnham College. There was a curfew and blackout at night. If anyone forgot to draw their thick curtains after dark, people from the street were heard to shout: ‘Put those lights out!’ Then soldiers’ gas masks were given out. Thank God they never had to be used in earnest, as I believe they were in the First World War. At the beginning of this Second World War, there was great hope that it would only last a short time. Soon the first air raid warnings were sounded.547
The change was noted by Reynolds on a rare trip to the capital. ‘London is frightening at night,’ he wrote to a relative in November.548 He eagerly anticipated the publication of his book that month. Just as his work as a translator in the First World War had allowed him to help the national effort, he viewed When Freedom Shrieked as ‘the best contribution I could make to our cause’. However, he was nervous about how the book would be received. ‘I hope it will be widely read,’ Reynolds wrote.549 He need not have worried. The book went into a second edition in less than two weeks and received positive newspaper reviews, including from his former employer.
‘Extensive experience joined with the habit of trained observation gives the book a background lacking in many other works written about the Nazi regime,’ asserted the Mail’s reviewer. Any previous clash of opinion with bosses at the newspaper was conveniently forgotten.
Reporting on Hitler Page 24