THE PALESTINE QUESTION
Official British policy towards Palestine had its origins in the ‘Balfour Declaration’ of 1917, a pledge made by the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, in a letter to Lord Rothschild, head of the British branch of the Jewish banking dynasty, that Britain would aid Zionists in their efforts to establish a home for world Jewry in Palestine, traditionally the land promised to the Jews by God. It was believed to have mobilised powerful Jewish support for the Western Allies in the United States; Winston Churchill even believed that Jewish pressure had been partly responsible for America’s entry into the war on the Allied side.35
After the war Britain was granted a temporary mandate over Palestine; Balfour’s pledge came with it. Yet it was evident that if Britain were to impose a Jewish state on the Arabs of Palestine it would alienate the Arab world, whose friendship was needed to secure Middle Eastern oil and the vital passage through the Suez Canal to the eastern Empire. In the event, the volume of post-war Jewish immigration to Palestine led to clashes between Jews and Arabs, and in 1936 to a Palestinian Arab revolt. The British government sent out a Royal Commission under Lord Robert Peel, which recommended partition: the Jews to have a state in the north of Palestine, the Arabs a larger state in the south and east, with necessary exchanges of population. The Arabs were particularly unhappy with the plan, and the government set up a second Royal Commission to examine it in detail before it finally dismissed partition as unworkable.
With the need to secure Arab goodwill in the European war in prospect, Chamberlain’s government put forward its own solution in a White Paper in May 1939: Palestine to become an independent state within ten years, the population ratio regulated at two Arabs to every Jew; Jewish immigration to be limited to 75,000 in total over the next five years and, crucially, no further Jewish immigration after that without Arab consent. Churchill, who had been fighting a lonely battle against Chamberlain’s appeasement policy in Europe, denounced this blatant propitiation of the Arabs as a repudiation of Balfour’s pledge to the Zionists, which it was. Nonetheless, it was approved by Parliament.
It is interesting that Adolf Eichmann, the expert on Jewish emigration and Zionism in Himmler’s Security Service Main Office, visited Palestine in November 1937, four months after publication of the Peel Commission report. He found the ‘Jewish Nationalist’ – or Zionist – leaders in confident mood, looking forward to the establishment of the Jewish state proposed by Peel as soon as possible, and expecting to be able to expand from it southwards into the territory marked out for the Arabs. They told Eichmann that if the English showed an inclination to postpone partition, the Jewish defence organisation would open hostilities against them. They further said they were delighted by the ‘radical’ German Jewish policy which would drive more Jews to emigrate to Palestine and give them a majority over the Arabs within foreseeable time.36
One of the aims of Reichskristallnacht the following November, 1938, was certainly to drive more Jews from Germany. By coincidence or design it took place a fortnight before the House of Commons debated the second Royal Commission report, which came down against Peel’s partition plan for Palestine.
Time had run out for the Zionists; in May 1939, the day before Parliament approved the government plan for radically restricting Jewish immigration in what was to become the independent Arab state of Palestine, Hitler signed the ‘Pact of Steel’ with Mussolini. He was preparing to strike against Poland. European war would close down the Palestine issue for the duration.
CHAPTER FIVE
Struggle for peace
THE BRITISH AND FRENCH governments, resolving to confront Hitler’s threatened advance on Poland, guaranteed support for Polish independence. However, Chamberlain and Halifax still hoped a negotiated settlement might be possible, and although the Polish pledge had little strategic validity without Russian participation, both shrank from an alliance with the Bolsheviks. Stalin suspected, with reason, that at bottom they would prefer to leave Hitler a free hand against the Soviet Union.
The British government’s great landowning and business backers were certainly of this persuasion. Two of the more committed, the Duke of Buccleuch and Lord Brocket, demonstrated their feelings by flying to Berlin to attend Hitler’s 50th birthday celebrations that year.1 Brocket was on the pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic wing of Conservative opinion, Buccleuch, who deplored the Nazi persecution of the Jews, was a mainstream imperialist, viewing Soviet Russia as a greater potential danger to the Empire than Nazi Germany, and desiring detachment from any European commitment.2 Such was the stance taken by most influential strategists of the time, their overriding consideration being to avoid the carnage of the last war.
In July Halifax received warning from Albrecht Haushofer via Clydesdale that the strike against Poland would be launched any time after the middle of August. Hitler, Albrecht wrote in his letter to ‘Douglo’, was still thinking in terms of British bluff. He wanted to avoid a ‘big war’ and hoped he might get away with an isolated local war; but Albrecht, fearing that ‘the terrific forms of modern war’ would make any reasonable peace impossible, argued they had to stop the explosion taking place: Britain should produce a peace plan for a long-term settlement between Germany and Poland ‘based upon considerable territorial changes combined with population exchanges on the Greek–Turkish model’.3
Albrecht gave Clydesdale permission to show the letter personally to Halifax or his undersecretary, R.A. Butler. Significantly in view of later events, Clydesdale showed it to Churchill first, then to Halifax and Chamberlain, and instead of destroying it, as Albrecht had insisted he should, deposited it with his bank. Since the advice amounted to no more than a repeat ‘Munich’ over Poland, it is as likely to have been issued on Hess’s behalf – the injunction to destroy it a ruse to conceal his patron’s involvement – as to have been from Albrecht off his own bat as a friend or member of the German opposition.
At much the same time in July, one of Göring’s chief economic advisers, Dr Wohltat, held talks in London with Sir Horace Wilson, Chamberlain’s principal adviser on foreign affairs, who proposed an Anglo–German treaty of non-aggression and non-interference. A few days afterwards, another emissary from Göring, Birger Dahlerus, the Swedish managing director of a ball-bearing company in Luton who had personal connections to Göring, was introduced to Halifax for an off-the-record meeting. There were at least two subsequent deniable meetings between the two,4 the upshot of which was a very secret conference from 7–10 August on the German North Sea island of Sylt between seven British businessmen, led by a director of the great shipbuilding company John Brown, and an extremely high-level German team led by Göring himself.5 The British side, while insisting that the guarantee to Poland was firm, offered another four-power conference between Chamberlain, Hitler, Mussolini and the French premier, Daladier, to solve all outstanding European ‘problems’, with the Polish ‘Corridor’ and port of Danzig at the top of the agenda. They came away, like Halifax earlier, convinced of Göring’s honesty: ‘He impressed us all as being surprisingly trustworthy and straight.’6
These, and no doubt many other less formal contacts, reminiscent of Sir Edward Grey’s desperate attempts to preserve peace in the dying days before the first war, failed to deter Hitler. They served only to convince him that, when tested, Britain and France would back out of their pledge to Poland. At the least it confirmed the strength and depth of British opposition to war. From the British side, it confirmed Göring as the acceptable face of the Nazi leadership. These impressions would persist.
THE NAZI–SOVIET PACT
British and French reluctance to enlist Soviet support forced Stalin to come to terms with Hitler. The announcement of the Nazi–Soviet non-aggression pact on 22 August 1939 came as a huge surprise to the Western powers, but it served the interests of both dictators. Hitler avoided the two-front war his generals refused to contemplate; Stalin bought time and acquired a buffer between him and h
is sworn foe – since it was agreed in a secret protocol that Poland and other intervening territories would be divided between them. He also gained a trade deal and the transfer of advanced military technology from Germany.
Hitler had been advised that the deal was secure a week earlier, and had immediately ordered preparations for the attack on Poland – termed ‘Case White’ – for the early hours of 26 August. Chamberlain only learned of the Soviet pact on the 22nd; he immediately wrote to Hitler to disabuse him of the idea that it would prevent Britain intervening on behalf of Poland. The French government took the same line. On the 25th Hitler nevertheless gave the executive order for Case White. That evening he learned that his friend Mussolini would not support him, and that a Polish–British defence pact had been signed as annex to a Franco–Polish military alliance, and he rescinded the order.
At about the time he backed down, Birger Dahlerus, who had flown to London to see Halifax on Göring’s behalf to propose a Munich-style ‘mediation’, was shown in to the Foreign Secretary’s grand room in the Foreign Office. Halifax refused the bait, but was flexible enough for Göring to continue negotiating via Dahlerus for many days, even offering to fly to London himself.7
Earlier that day, the 25th, Halifax had seen a prospective British peace envoy named James Lonsdale Bryans.8 An Old Etonian, Bryans had recently been brought to the attention of MI5 by the police Special Branch in Malaya, where he had come to ‘adverse notice’ for saying ‘he was in entire sympathy with Hitler’ and trying, without success, to gate-crash the Penang Club on the strength of his old school tie.9 Halifax, who would not have seen this report as Bryans had not been vetted, gave him his backing, according to Bryans’ own account, ‘to make contact with enemy groups opposed to Hitler’.10 Why Halifax should have considered him suitable for this mission is a puzzle.
There is a possible clue in Bryans’ MI5 file: a handwritten note on the minute sheet runs, ‘H—y [or perhaps M—y] got his name from D of B as a potential contact with Germany.’11 If ‘H—y’, this could have been Sir Maurice Hankey, the influential former cabinet secretary then serving on a committee overseeing the secret services, while ‘D of B’ probably referred to the Duke of Buccleuch. Many letters testify to the fact that Bryans was backed by Buccleuch and the pro-Nazi Lord Brocket.12 As for his credentials as a ‘contact with Germany’, Bryans proclaimed his hatred for democracy and Jews, and was the author of a book on evolution called The Curve of Fate which so conformed to Nazi philosophy, it had recently been accepted for publication by a Leipzig publishing house.
Whatever the explanation, Bryans had already been granted an exit permit to travel to Venice. His stated purpose was to act as agent for the domestic affairs of Sir Hubert Miller, an elderly Hampshire landowner and former Guards officer who loved Venice and owned property in the city. Sir Hubert provided Bryans with a reference, as did Lord Rushcliffe, a Conservative politician and former government minister.13
However, according to Bryans’ subsequent accounts, he made for Rome, arriving ‘at the end of September’. There, after some weeks, he gained the confidence of a young Italian staying at the same hotel, who was engaged to be married to the daughter of the German ‘conservative opposition’ leader, Ulrich von Hassell.14 It is interesting that this young man, Detalmo Pirzio-Biroli, was scion of an aristocratic family with estates in the department of Venezia, north-east of Venice. Could it be that Bryans went, or was sent, to Venice to meet him? There was ample time between his meeting with Halifax on 25 August and his arrival in Rome at the end of September. Yet if he went to Venice first, why should he have concealed it? There are several unanswered questions about his mission but the most significant remains why Halifax should have backed an unknown, inexperienced and, as it would prove, thoroughly unreliable agent.
The young Pirzio-Biroli was the son of General Allessandro Pirzio-Biroli and an American mother. He had been educated in the United States, and had visited England as a student in 1935, coming to the attention of Special Branch, who reported him stating that he was in London ‘on a matter of policy’.15 Later, in Rome, when von Hassell was the very popular German Ambassador in Mussolini’s capital, Pirzio-Biroli had met and fallen in love with his daughter, Fey, and they had become engaged.
In the closing months of 1939 when Bryans ‘gained his confidence’, Pirzio had just come back from Germany, where he had been staying with von Hassell, who had given him a summary of the terms of peace which a new ‘conservative’ Germany, purged of Hitler, would be prepared to accept.16 Bryans took the document for conveyance to Halifax.
WAR
Returning to the evening of 25 September 1939, the day Lonsdale Bryans had received his unofficial commission from Halifax, and Hitler had aborted the next day’s planned attack on Poland, Hess, in Graz, Austria, addressed a congress of expatriate Germans on the Polish issue. Germany, he began, had shown immense forbearance in the face of Polish incitements to war and outrages against Germans living in Poland. It was England’s responsibility for inciting the Poles; her reason for doing so was that Jews and Freemasons there wanted the war against Germany, ‘this Germany in which they have lost their power.’17
He concluded with an affirmation of faith that providence had sent the Führer as their deliverance: ‘In standing by the Führer we fulfil the will of that which sent us the Führer. We Germans, we stand by the colours of the Führer – come what may!’
He returned to Berlin, and there is a glimpse of him in Hitler’s Chancellery in a surviving fragment of Himmler’s diary for 28 August. It was evening. The British Ambassador had presented a note reiterating Britain’s determination to honour her pledge to Poland. Hitler had said he would give his reply the next day. Afterwards, Himmler noted, he and Göring and Hess joined Hitler and his Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, in the conservatory. Hitler appeared to be in a very good mood, mimicking the ambassador’s ‘thick English accent’. He told them it was now necessary ‘to aim a document at the British (or Poles) that is little less than a masterpiece of diplomacy’.18
The Poles refused to respond to the masterpiece, and at four in the afternoon of the 31st Hitler again gave the order for ‘Case White’. This time he did not rescind it. The assault was preceded by carefully prepared and rehearsed ‘provocations’ in which Polish-speaking SS men in Polish uniforms took over German posts on the border in mock battles. Concentration camp inmates were brought to the scene, dressed in Polish uniforms, and then shot, the corpses being photographed in situ as evidence of the Polish ‘invasion’. At 4.30 in the morning of 1 September German tank columns supported by aircraft crossed the border at multiple points. An hour later Hitler broadcast to his people: Poland had violated the frontier; he had had no option but to meet force with force.
Britain and France lacked military plans to give effect to the guarantee on which they were now hoist, but after vain protests found no option but to honour their pledge, and on 3 September both reluctantly declared war on Germany. So, finally, Hitler’s England Politik had failed.
The British Ambassador, committed to appeasement to the very end, gained the impression that the mass of German people were horror-struck at the war thrust upon them.19 The American journalist, William L. Shirer, looking at silent groups in the Wilhelmplatz, Berlin, had a similar perception of a people stunned by the outbreak of a second European war.20
German troops conducting the new Blitzkrieg, or lightning war tactics through Polish defences had few doubts; certainly the members of Himmler’s special Einsatzkommandos following the advancing armies were executing orders to liquidate Jews, aristocrats, priests and the professional classes with savage conviction.21 Himmler’s chief executive, Reinhard Heydrich, explained the mission to his group commanders on 21 September: the aim was to expunge the Polish nation from the map; once the Polish leaders and educated classes had been annihilated, the Polish people would be incorporated in the German economy as migrant workers.
The Western Allies, meanwhile, did nothing to ease the Poles’ agony before the armoured onslaught that was crushing them. The Italian Ambassador in Paris told his British counterpart that he had seen several wars waged without being declared, but this was the first he had seen declared without being waged.23
In Britain those influential groups opposed to fighting Germany called for a negotiated peace. The Duke of Westminster hosted anti-war meetings at his London house attended by such grandees as the Duke of Buccleuch, the Marquis of Londonderry, the Marquis of Tavistock, heir to the Duke of Bedford, and numerous nobles of lesser pedigree, including Lord Brocket, Lord Noel-Buxton, who led a ‘Peace Aims’ group, and Lord Harmsworth, brother of the newspaper magnates, Lords Northcliffe and Rothermere.24
These aristocrats exercised great leverage in the Conservative Party through their wealth and palatial establishments, old school, family and club connections. Westminster himself, like Lord Brocket, was on the pro-Nazi wing of the peace campaigners; he was reported to the War Cabinet that September for saying the war was part of a Jewish plot to destroy Christian civilisation.25 Lord Brocket had been reported to the internal security service, MI5, shortly before the outbreak as a result of a telephone interception revealing him making a secret assignation with an official of the German Embassy.26 Others like Tavistock and Noel-Buxton were pacifists, but perhaps the majority were simply expressing the view held by military experts and many ordinary people – especially after an announcement on 17 September that the Russians were invading Poland from the east – that Britain should not be involved in the war, and that Bolshevism represented a greater danger than Nazism.
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