The Defence of the Realm
Page 27
Until 1933, MI5 paid ‘practically no attention’ to Nazism – nor did Whitehall expect that it should.14 The rise to power of the forty-three-yearold fanatic Adolf Hitler as chancellor of a coalition government on 30 January 1933 (in retrospect one of the turning points of modern history) rang few alarm bells either in the Security Service or in most of Whitehall. Next day The Times commented: ‘That Herr Hitler, who leads the strongest party in the Reichstag and obtained almost one third of the more than 35 million votes in the last election, should be given the chance of showing that he is something more than an orator and an agitator was always desirable . . .’15 The Hitler regime first showed itself in its true colours after the burning of the Reichstag on 27 February by a former Dutch Communist, Marinus van der Lubbe. Though van der Lubbe almost certainly acted alone, the entire Nazi leadership and many others convinced themselves that the fire had been intended as the signal for a Communist insurrection. Hermann Göring, then Prussian Interior Minister and police chief, issued a press statement claiming that documents seized during a police raid on German Communist Party (KPD) headquarters a few days earlier contained plans (which were never published) for attacks on public buildings and the assassination of leading politicians. An emergency decree ‘For the Protection of People and State’ suspended indefinitely the personal liberties enshrined in the Weimar constitution, among them freedom of speech, of association and of the press. A brutal round-up followed of Communists, Social Democrats, trade unionists and left-wing intellectuals, who were dragged into the cellars of local SA and SS units, brutally beaten and sometimes tortured. An election victory on 5 March gave Hitler and his nationalist allies the majority he needed (once Communist deputies had been excluded) to establish his dictatorship. Hitler’s biographer Ian Kershaw concludes that, within Germany, ‘The violence and repression were widely popular.’16
Even in Britain, except on the left, protests at Nazi brutality were relatively muted. The Times leader-writer commented on 22 March: ‘However much foreign friends of the country may deplore the cruelties inflicted by German upon German . . . all that is primarily a matter for Germany herself . . . In all of this there is nothing yet to indicate that the new Chancellor intends to be immoderate in his foreign policy.’17 Hitler in fact intended to be more immoderate in his foreign policy than any other European of the twentieth century, though he no longer referred publicly to the huge ambitions for ‘living space’ in Eastern Europe he had set out in Mein Kampf. In March 1933, however, the Security Service was no more alarmed than The Times. Its main immediate response to Hitler’s rise to power was to accept, with no visible soul-searching, an invitation from Berlin to discuss the haul of material on Comintern operations captured during the raid on KPD headquarters.18 On 22 March the SS opened its first, infamous concentration camp at a disused powder-mill in a suburb of Dachau, about 12 miles from Munich. A week later Guy Liddell, a fluent German-speaker, arrived in Berlin ‘to establish contact with the German Political Police’ and seek access to the Comintern documents. SIS volunteered to pay half the expenses of Liddell’s visit as well as providing assistance from the head of its Berlin station, Frank Foley.19
Liddell’s host, during his ten days in Berlin, was Hitler’s Harvardeducated foreign-press liaison officer, Ernst ‘Putzi’ Hanfstaengel, whom Liddell found ‘on the whole an extremely likeable person’ but ‘quite unbalanced’ about both Jews and Communists: ‘He is under the erroneous impression that Communism is a movement controlled by the Jews.’ Liddell was deeply sceptical about Nazi claims that, thanks to tough action by the new regime, ‘a serious Communist outbreak had just been averted’:
In fact all our evidence goes to show that, although the German Communist Party may have contemplated a peaceful street demonstration which might have provoked violent counter-demonstrations by the Nazis, Moscow had issued definite instructions that no overt act was to be committed which could in any way lead to the wholesale repression of the Party.
Liddell was equally unconvinced by ‘a map which purported to show that International Jewry was being controlled from London’, and took an instant dislike to the thirty-three-year-old head of the political police (soon to become the Gestapo), Rudolf Diels:20
His face is scarred from the sword duels of his student days. His jet black hair, slit eyes and sallow complexion give him a rather Chinese appearance. Although he had an unpleasant personality he was extremely polite and later when he came round on a tour of inspection gave orders to all present that I was to be given every possible facility.
The few documents from KPD headquarters seen by Liddell, however, were deeply disappointing: ‘Most of the raids were carried out by the Sturm Abteilung [SA], who just threw the documents into lorries and then dumped them in disorder in some large rooms.’ Ironically therefore Liddell concentrated instead on records of a Soviet front organization, the League Against Imperialism (LAI), which had been captured during a police raid over a year before Hitler came to power and, unlike those seized from KPD headquarters, had been carefully filed away. Liddell found further evidence in these files both of Soviet funding for the LAI and of Comintern instructions to Indian Communists.21
Liddell left Berlin with no illusions about the brutality of the Nazi regime. ‘A number of Jews, Communists and even Social Democrats’, he reported, ‘have undoubtedly been submitted to every kind of outrage and this was still going on at the time of my departure.’ But Liddell wrongly believed that the current brutality was likely to prove a passing phase, and that the Comintern remained a more serious problem than the Nazi regime:
In their present mood, the German police are extremely ready to help us in any way they can. It is, however, essential, that constant personal contact should be maintained . . . so that when the present rather hysterical atmosphere of sentiment and brutality dies down, the personal relations established will outweigh any forms of bureaucracy which would normally place restrictions on a free interchange of information.
The most disturbing part of Liddell’s report on his visit to Berlin is a prejudiced appendix on ‘The Anti-Jewish Movement’ which, while dismissing Nazi anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, claimed that there was a serious basis for claims that official corruption during the Weimar Republic was due chiefly to the Jews:
There have undoubtedly been some very serious cases of corruption in Government institutions where the Jews had a firm foothold. For the last ten years it has been extremely noticeable that access to the chief of any department was only possible through the intermediary of a Jew. It was the Jew who did most of the talking and in whose hands the working out of any scheme was ultimately left.22
Liddell’s denunciation of German-Jewish corruption did not derive from a more general anti-Semitism. It was at his proposal that Victor Rothschild was later invited to join the wartime Security Service.23 His memorandum was none the less the lowest point in a distinguished career.
The first Security Service officer to grasp the seriousness of the Nazi threat was John ‘Jack’ Curry, who joined B Branch in 1934 after a quarter of a century in the Indian police.24 Curry was also the first B Branch officer to pay serious attention to the British Union of Fascists (BUF), founded in 1932 by the political maverick, fencing champion and former Labour minister Sir Oswald Mosley, who modelled the BUF black-shirt uniform on his fencing tunic. Curry joined Mosley’s January Club, led by two former Indian army officers, which organized dinner parties for those thought likely to be receptive to Fascist ideas and was believed to be targeting other retired officers from the armed services. After a series of tedious dinners, Curry concluded that the Club had little appeal to former servicemen and was not worth further investigation.25
The Security Service’s main source of intelligence on the BUF came from Maxwell Knight’s contacts and agents inside the movement, some of whom dated back to his earlier membership of the British Fascisti.26 His early reports, however, were somewhat distorted by his belief in the BUF’s genuine, if wrong-headed,
patriotism. Until the spring of 1934 he refused to believe reports from Rome that the BUF was receiving secret subsidies from Mussolini.27 On 13 April Knight admitted his mistake. He reported that before Mosley’s visit to Italy in March the BUF had been in dire financial straits with talk of Mosley having to sell his late wife’s jewels. Since his return from Italy, however, BUF finances had suddenly returned to health. Knight’s sources within the BUF reported that it had an active membership of 35,000 to 40,000.28 A majority, however, probably did no more than pay subscriptions and purchase Blackshirt and other BUF publications. The Security Service later estimated the BUF’s active membership, at its peak in 1934, at only about 10,000.29
The evidence of foreign funding for the BUF, combined with street fighting between black-shirted Fascists and Communists, chiefly in the East End of London, prompted Kell to prepare his first full-scale report for the Home Office and other government departments on ‘The Fascist Movement in the United Kingdom’. Early in May 1934 he wrote to chief constables in England, Scotland and Wales asking them to supply details at regular intervals of BUF membership, together with ‘their opinion as to the importance to be attached to this movement in their areas’. From their replies he concluded that ‘the Fascists have been more active and successful in the industrial areas and that their achievements in the majority of the Counties may be regarded as negligible’. He reported to the Home Office that the prospect of a Fascist coup was still far away, but detected ‘various tendencies’ which were ‘bringing Sir Oswald Mosley and his followers more to the front of the stage’. Their propaganda was ‘extremely clever’.30 The Fascist threat, such as it was, appeared to reach its peak at the Olympia rally in June 1934, extravagantly proclaimed beforehand by the BUF as ‘a landmark, not only in the history of fascism, but also in the history of Britain’. Most of the choreography for the rally was borrowed from Hitler and Mussolini. Mosley marched to the platform lit by a spotlight through a forest of Union Jacks and BUF banners while uniformed Blackshirts gave the Fascist salute and chanted ‘Hail Mosley!’ Fights between hecklers and Fascist stewards started almost as soon as Mosley began to speak, and continued intermittently for the next two hours. ‘The Blackshirt spirit’, declared Mosley afterwards, ‘triumphed at Olympia. It smashed the biggest organised attempt ever made in this country to wreck a meeting by Red violence.’ The Communist Daily Worker also claimed victory: ‘The great Olympia counter-demonstration of the workers against Blackshirts stands out as an important landmark in the struggle against Fascism in this country.’31 Though virtuously disclaiming all responsibility for the violence, both the BUF and the CPGB, in MI5’s view, used ‘illegal and violent methods’: ‘In fact, both . . . were delighted with the results of Olympia.’32
Despite the evidence of foreign Fascist funding for the BUF, the Home Secretary, Sir John Gilmour, refused a Security Service application for an HOW on Mosley,33 apparently in the belief that he remained a staunch patriot who posed no threat to national security. His successor, Sir John Simon, continued to refuse an HOW even when, two years later, Mosley married his second wife, the former Diana Mitford, in a private ceremony attended by Hitler in Goebbels’s drawing room. Hitler gave Diana a signed photograph in an eagle-topped silver frame which she kept in the marital bedroom.34 MI5 later concluded that ‘Before the outbreak of war Lady Mosley was the principal channel of communication with Hitler. Mosley himself has admitted she had frequent interviews with the Fuhrer.’35 But until their internment in 1940 both, remarkably, were not subject to HOWs, though copies of letters to and from them turned up in the correspondence of other, less well-connected Fascists on whom MI5 did obtain HOWs.
After the Olympia rally of June 1934 the cabinet briefly turned its attention to ways of preventing further rallies in which Fascists paraded in political uniforms. But the problems of framing new legislation to prevent such rallies were complicated by the difficulty of defining what ‘political uniforms’ were. Possibly reassured by Security Service reports, the cabinet gradually lost its sense of urgency. Kell reported to the Home Office in October 1934:
It is becoming increasingly clear that at Olympia Mosley suffered a check which is likely to prove decisive. He suffered it, not at the hands of the Communists who staged the provocations and now claim the victory, but at the hands of Conservative MPs, the Conservative Press and all those organs of public opinion which made him abandon the policy of using his ‘Defence Force’ to overwhelm interrupters.
The BUF had been publicly disowned a month after Olympia by the press baron Lord Rothermere, previously its most prominent Conservative supporter. Mosley himself was said by MI5 to be in a state of ‘acute depression’ and the deputy leader of the BUF, Dr Robert Forgan, who later left the movement, was reported ‘to have doubts as to his leader’s sanity’.36 MI5 reported in March 1935 that, according to a trustworthy source, Fascist ‘cells’ had been formed in ‘various branches of the Civil Service’. But the general tenor of Kell’s intelligence continued to be reassuring. Reports to MI5 from chief constables showed that, in all major cities except Manchester, BUF membership had declined, branches had closed, sales of the Blackshirt had dropped and enthusiasm had cooled.37 Aware of the BUF’s lack of electoral appeal (though unwilling to accept that violence at its rallies had damaged its reputation), Mosley fielded no candidates at the November 1935 general election. The landslide victory of the National Government underlined the BUF’s increasing irrelevance in British politics.
Mussolini’s subsidies did little or nothing to arrest the steady decline of the BUF during the two years after the Olympia rally. A Nazi ideologue of Scottish extraction, Colin Ross, visited England in April 1936 to report on the state of the British Fascists. According to the Special Branch, which kept him under close surveillance, Ross concluded that the BUF had ‘a fine policy and a splendid leader, but absolutely no organisation’. There were signs, none the less, of growing German influence among the Blackshirts. In July, despite Hitler’s unwillingness to provide secret funding, the BUF changed its full title to the British Union of Fascists and National Socialists. ‘Mosley’, MI5 noted, ‘has also shown a closer approach to the German spirit in his more pronounced attacks on the Jews during recent months’.38 Kell reported to the Home Office in July 1936 that the monthly Italian subsidies had been cut from £3,000 to £1,000, and that the BUF was in ‘general decline’:
It is true that in the East End Fascist speakers have had a better welcome than elsewhere, but there is a good deal of anti-semitic feeling there and anti-semitic speeches are therefore welcome. There does not seem to be any reason for believing that public opinion in the East End is becoming seriously pro-Fascist.39
The Security Service emphasized the growing influence within the BUF of the pro-Nazi William Joyce who, it reported, had greater influence on militant Blackshirts than Mosley himself. It continued for several years to rely on a rather optimistic appreciation of Joyce by Knight (identified in reports to the Home Office only as ‘someone who knows him well’), written in September 1934, which claimed that, though Joyce was ‘a rabid anti-Catholic’ and ‘a fanatical anti-Semite’ with ‘a mental balance . . . not equal to his intellectual capacity’, it was unlikely that anything ‘could occur to shake his basic patriotism’.40 In fact Joyce was dismissed from the BUF in 1937, formed the stridently pro-Nazi (but small) British National Socialist League, took German citizenship in 1940 and became infamous as ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, broadcasting Nazi propaganda to wartime Britain.
On 4 October 1936 the attempt by four columns of Blackshirts to march to meetings in Shoreditch, Stepney, Bethnal Green and Limehouse led to the ‘battle of Cable Street’ when anti-Fascists threw up a barricade in the Blackshirts’ path, fought with police and forced Mosley to divert his march along the Embankment. The day produced, according to the Special Branch, ‘undoubtedly the largest anti-Fascist demonstration yet seen in London’. It also led the government to recover the sense of urgency it had lost after the Olympia ral
ly two years before. Though still unwilling to authorize an HOW on Mosley, Sir John Simon told the cabinet: ‘There cannot be the slightest doubt that the Fascist campaign . . . is stimulating the Communist movement so that the danger of a serious clash is growing.’ A Public Order Bill prohibiting political uniforms and empowering the police to forbid political processions was rushed through parliament and came into effect on 1 January 1937.41