by A. N. Wilson
When, less than two weeks before, on 30 November 1936, the Crystal Palace, outward and visible sign of buoyant economic liberalism, was destroyed by fire, it must have seemed to many as if the Victorian Age was now decisively over. The building which, when it was erected, had embodied so many Victorian causes for self-congratulation now buckled and melted in a prodigious conflagration visible for miles around. And yet in the closing scenes of the Abdication, Britain, and most especially England, seemed to be enacting a rather different story. The Victorian Establishment, the privately educated parliamentarians, the civil servants who knew the Odes of Horace by heart, and the House of Lords continued unshaken. The young man with soft collars and a fondness for jazz records was sent packing by a septuagenarian Archbishop and Prime Minister. In place at Windsor were a royal family whose gentle and retiring habits would have won the approval of Prince Albert himself. Although younger in years than his brother, the new King George VI, in his attitudes and habits, was about a hundred years older. Age had defeated Youth; Conservatism had vanquished Progressivism; Religion of a distinctly stiff-corseted kind had cast out Secularism; Perfect Fear had cast out Love.
Those who paint a purely political picture of the abdication get it wrong. So do conspiracy theorists. It was, however, a drama which convulsed the nation, obsessing even those who would normally consider themselves too sophisticated to be interested in the royal family.
On that 10 December, Malcolm Muggeridge wrote in his Diary:
In the evening we sat listening to the wireless broadcasting the news of the King’s abdication. I had the feeling that the affair somehow symbolized the whole horror of life, the struggle between Man’s noblest, richest impulses, and the shoddy fabric of Time. Hughie [Kingsmill, writer and wit] described how he had once visited in Brittany the ruins of an ancient sacrificial Temple, and how there he had first realized what sacrifice meant – the offering up of Youth by Age, a spiking of young blood by withered arms, paying Life as a tribute to Death … We drove Hughie back. Blackshirts were selling their papers in the streets surrounded by a circle of admiring girls. Kit [Muggeridge, his wife] keeps saying to me: ‘Everything’s going to be all right, isn’t it?’ and I nod without conviction.39
25
The European Crisis
Between July 1936 and 1 April 1939, Spain was involved in a civil war which not only involved its own citizens in ferocious bloodletting, but which also gripped the imagination, and engaged the political conscience, of all the other major European powers. Because of the direct intervention, with economic aid, arms and troops, on one side of the Soviet Union, on the other side of Germany and Italy, the Spanish Civil War has seemed to many to be a dress rehearsal for the world war which followed.
Yet there are many paradoxes about viewing it in this way. The war was won by the Right. The generals who had rebelled against the elected leftist government in 1936 achieved their objective. General Franco became a dictator who held power until his death in 1975. Tens of thousands of republicans, after the civil war, were shot, or given prison-sentences of over twenty years. But estimates for the numbers actually killed in the war ‘have dropped and dropped’ according to the historian Hugh Thomas,1 who also believes that ‘it would be perfectly admissible to argue that Spain lost fewer people dead in acts of violence than any other major European nation in [the twentieth] century’.2
At the time, the unimaginable numbers of twentieth-century dead were either in the future, or had been concealed. Very few believed those, such as Malcolm Muggeridge, who spoke of the organized famines in the Ukraine, killing perhaps over 10 million. And the massacre of 6 million Jews, or the killing of over 200,000 Japanese civilians before the dropping of nuclear bombs, or the bombing of German cities, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, these and comparable war crimes lay in the future. The bombing of the Basque town of Guernica, therefore, killing a few hundred, seemed, quite rightly, to be an act of terrible savagery. Strangely enough, it is those nations, Britain and America, who killed civilian numbers of this order roughly every hour of the last year of the Second World War who make most of a cult of Picasso’s famous painting evoking Guernica’s tragedy.
We are almost still too close to the Second World War, and to the Spanish War which was its overture, to speak or write about it rationally. But perhaps we are approaching the era when such a rationality might become at least a possibility? In which case, what do we make of the fact that General Franco, an autocratic military leader who won his victory with the help of German Nazis and Italian fascists, and who was prepared to exercise a murderous autocracy for about eight years after his victory, went on to lead a modern European state deep into our own lifetimes, and did so peaceably, prosperously and seamlessly? He achieved, without any Marshall Aid or outside help, an economic revolution in the 1960s, and he handed over his regime into the hands of a constitutional monarch, Juan Carlos, who must rank as one of the most enlightened of modern world leaders. Meanwhile, in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union which had sent aid to the elected government of Spain throughout the civil war, and which was to become the ally of the Western powers during the Second World War, is now seen to be without any rival as the most murderous, repressive and tyrannous system of human enslavement ever to exercise dominion over the human race.
It is very understandable why people on both sides of the political divide saw Spain as the stage on which their ideological conflicts were being enacted. And the policy of the British government throughout the Spanish Civil War, of broad sympathy for Franco while maintaining the non-interventionist position, seems in retrospect to be coherent. The broad interests of the British people, and the broad political allegiance of the governing party, both seem to have been met by this position.
And yet, the figure who is to emerge as the most important in the British and indeed Western political landscape, Winston Churchill, takes a different view.
When the civil war broke out, Churchill was in favour of Franco, but he changed. In August 1938, interviewed by a Buenos Aires newspaper, La Nación, he said: ‘Franco has all the right on his side because he loves his country. Also Franco is defending Europe against the Communist danger – if you wish to put it in those terms. But I – I am English, and I prefer the triumph of the wrong cause. I prefer that the other side wins, because Franco could be an upset or a threat to British interests and the others not.’3
If you were approaching this matter from even a partially rational point of view, this would be hard to understand. Churchill had been, since the first emergence of socialism as a viable political force in the politics of Britain and of the world, its most belligerent opponent, as he would continue to be after the Second World War. He hated Bolshevism, he hated communism, and he could see that Franco was defending not merely Spain, but Western Europe, from the possibility of being taken over by communism.
The tragedy of the twentieth century is that in order to defeat Hitler, Churchill believed it was not merely necessary but desirable to ally himself to Stalin. It is very easy, from our comfortable twenty-first-century armchairs, to take positions. We can rewrite history as imaginatively as we choose. We can say: ‘But – Franco saved Europe! If it had not been for Franco’s victory, Blum, the Socialist Prime Minister of France, would have allowed France to become communist, and then the sinister hand of Stalin would have held sway from Siberia to Dieppe.’ Or we can think the other way, and we can say that it would have somehow been possible for Britain to stand neutral, as, no doubt, many Conservatives in Baldwin’s cabinet and backbenchers wished. Hitler and Mussolini could have behaved in their monstrous way, but it did not directly concern the British Empire, so why should it have mattered whether Czechoslovakia, or Poland, or Austria was governed by this power or that?
In the end, such armchair history is rather tasteless. Millions upon millions died as a result of the Second World War. There is something unseemly about being wise after the event. History is the story of what happened, and not of what
did not happen. We can fantasize about what might have happened had the Second World War been averted. Millions of lives might have been saved. The Shoah, the slaughter of the Jews, would probably have been impossible in peacetime. Hitler, rather than Stalinist Russia, might have dominated Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary … In time, Hitler might have been overthrown by a decent group of Germans, or the German economy would have imploded, and Hitler would have fallen from grace in the eyes of the electorate; or Hitler would have been like Franco – horrific in his early years in peacetime power but latterly gentler, more in tune with the modern world. And so, millions upon millions of lives might have been saved. But history is the story of what was, not of what might have been. And whatever judgement we pass upon Churchill, and whatever view we take of the British, French and American politicians who directed the course and ultimately the victory of the Second World War, we have to say that one at least of the things which directed them was a sense of decency.4
Reck-Malleczewen, in his diaries, railed against the nations of the world ‘standing by and watching’ while Hitler triumphed. ‘You have broken our internal resistance through political lethargy.’ As he writes in his diaries, Luftwaffe bombers fly overhead, and he adds: ‘For a whole hour the drone has gone on above, as though these planes were flying against a world power. I am a German. I encircle this land in which I live with all my love … I know that this land is the living, beating heart of the world. I will go on believing in this heartbeat, despite all the covering layers of blood and dirt. But I know also that the thing up there that rumbles and thunders is the denial of right and justice, of truth and faith and everything that makes life worth living.’ In 1938, on 20 March, he wrote: ‘If five years ago, at the time of the so-called Power-Grab [Machtergreifung, the word the Nazis used for their assumption of power], the European nations had drown the sword – everything would have ended with a police raid, with the gang being hustled off to jail by the collars.’ Further, on 22 September 1939, when war had finally broken out between Britain and Germany, he wrote: ‘Germany has been sinking deeper and deeper into unreality … It is now completely drugged on its own lies. The cure will be more awful than anything ever seen before in history. One must hate Germany now, truly and bitterly, in order once again, if only for the sake of its glorious past, to be able later to enfold it in all of one’s love – like a parent with his misguided and unfortunate child.’
These are extraordinary words for a man to write about his own country.
Valentin Berzhkov, who worked as an interpreter for Stalin’s regime, was in Berlin during the spring and summer of 1940 as part of a commission monitoring deliveries of German technology to the Soviet Union under the terms of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact signed between the two dictatorships in August 1939 arranging for the partition of Poland. He found ‘how much there is in common’ … ‘The same idolization of the “leader”, the same mass rallies and parades … Very similar, ostentatious architecture, heroic themes depicted in art much like our socialist realism … massive ideological brainwashing’.5
Both régimes encouraged their citizens to spy on each other and denounce one another to the authorities. One of the marked contrasts between the Italian fascist regime and the German Nazis was that ordinary citizens willingly collaborated, in Germany, with informing on foreign workers, Jews, criminals and others they deemed undesirable. The psychology of this kind of ‘good citizenship’ weakened the strength of resistance movements in Germany and softened up the ‘ordinary’ Germans, so that they were prepared, when the killing started in earnest, that is after 1941, to condone or even to participate in the most monstrous acts. That such acts would happen, intelligent German observers, such as Bonhoeffer or Reck-Malleczewen, could not doubt, from quite an early stage. But it is worth while to note the differences, as well as the similarities, between the Germany of Hitler and the Soviet Union of Stalin, not in order to exonerate anyone from blame, but in order to explain: to explain how the Germans could have behaved as they did, and how those outside Germany could have believed themselves to be doing right either in condoning Hitler’s regime, or appeasing it, or collaborating with it.
One very simple difference between Germany and the Soviet Union was that Germans, with a few very obvious exceptions, were allowed to own property. The Nazi leadership had a gangster mentality, looting and stealing what they chose from the palaces of the Wittelsbachs in Bavaria, for example, as well as purloining the assets of Jews. They were certainly not respecters of property in the conventional sense. But their politics were inspired by fantasies of race rather than by Marxist notions of capital. The factory owner, the businessman, the shopkeeper, provided he was of Aryan stock, and provided he was prepared to go along with the government, could continue his independent life. Many prospered, and not just the owners themselves. In the apparent ‘economic miracle’ which Hitler had worked, tens of thousands of Germans, who had been out of work during the Weimar days, or who had lost their savings, felt their prosperity return. In November 1936, Viktor Klemperer saw a young man in the crowded Berlin street – ‘a complete stranger’. He ‘half turns and says with a beaming face, “I’ve got work – the first time in three years – and good work – at Renner’s – they pay well! – for four weeks”.’ There was a heady atmosphere of joy about those early National Socialist days for many people, such as the young man Klemperer saw. They could see the autobahns being constructed, and every family, in a People’s Car, a Volkswagen, could dream of driving about like lords of all they surveyed. This last dream, which continued to cheer Germans up until the outbreak of war, was, like many of the Führer’s promises, not as reliable as his admirers believed. Whereas by 1939 over 200,000 Germans had handed over the 1,000 Reichsmark purchase price, only 50 cars had been manufactured. (Compare the Morris factory in Oxford, producing 20,000 cars a year.) The point is, the people believed the Nazi propaganda about their being prosperous and efficient industrialists, and it made them happy. When the invasions of the Sudetenland, and the rest of Czechoslovakia were under way, it was very largely in order to bolster German industry, and to keep the factories supplied with necessary minerals and raw materials.6
Robert Gellately in his book Defending Hitler reiterates the fact – difficult to credit given all our post-dated hindsight, all our knowledge of the atrocities perpetrated post-1940 – that up to the outbreak of the Second World War, the Nazi regime was plausible to many people, Germans and non-Germans.
The concentration camps, for example, were not, as is sometimes imagined, kept as a secret from the populace, or indeed from the world.* When a concentration camp was started at the small town of Dachau, near Munich, the local Press hailed it as bringing ‘new hope for the Dachau business world’. It was ‘an economic turning point’, the ‘beginning of happier days’. On 23 May 1933, one newspaper crowed that Dachau was ‘Germany’s most famous place’, a ‘model concentration camp’. By 1936, some of the local councillors of Dachau (town population 8,234) were having their doubts about its reputation as ‘KZ city’ (that is Konzentrationslager). But the visitors who were allowed into the camp saw only lines of singing workers, marching in rhythm and working in a disciplined way. They imagined that the sole purpose of concentration camps was to discipline errant souls such as communists and to bring them into a better frame of mind. The concentration camps were ‘civilized’, ‘educative’, even ‘healing’. Bishop Hermann Wilhelm Berning, the Catholic bishop of Osnabrück, paid an official visit to the Emsland camps. ‘Those who doubt the constructive work of the Third Reich should be led here,’ he was quoted as saying. He saw Emsland as a Sleeping Beauty whose prince had been ‘our Führer Adolf Hitler’.
In July 1933 the numbers held in ‘protective custody’ in such places was put at 26,789. At Dachau, some 600 prisoners were released each month after ‘re-education’ or a short sharp shock. The fact that many detainees were tortured was kept secret, but very few, by the standards of General Franco, let us say, were killed
in the first six years, the prewar period of the Third Reich. Later, of course, the killings in Nazi prisons and camps turned into slaughter of horrific scale. In the little prison camp at Flossenbürg where Bonhoeffer was hanged, over 30,000 were killed. But when such ‘useful idiots’ as the bishop of Canabrück were making their visits to camps, they were not the death-factories they would become. They were boot-camps, of the kind which many conservative-minded people in Britain and America today wholeheartedly approve. The Nazis were much better at propaganda than twenty-first-century democratic governments. They had complete power over a censored Press, and they had a population who, in the first few years of their regime, grew more slavishly grateful to them for bringing jobs, prosperity and a sense of national pride. In the years 1934 and 1935, the populations of the concentration camps declined, many prisoners were released, and it was perfectly possible for Germans to be persuaded that, cruel as the remedy had been, it had been both non-murderous and efficacious in its battle against communism.7 By 1936, when the triumphant Olympic Games were so impressing Chips Channon, together with millions of others, the Germans had full employment, a system of public works which seemed to guarantee further employment, and a vigorous foreign policy in which their government was sticking up for their interests against the injustices of the Versailles treaty. Of course, they were, very many of them, happy. Bonhoeffer, from a position of moral intelligence and deep piety, Reck-Malleczewen, with his saving snobbery – seeing the fantastical commonness of figures such as Goring – were able to see through the regime. And there were hundreds of thousands of Germans who did so, too. But it is very difficult to budge a totalitarian régime, and, as Reck said in his journals, the cowardice of foreign regimes weakened the resolve of any potential resistance in Germany before the war.