The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred

by Niall Ferguson

  THE SOCIAL CHARACTER OF APPEASEMENT

  How are we to explain this grave and, it might be thought, uncharacteristically imprudent misjudgement? To attribute it to popular pacifism will not do; that is not the correct inference to draw from events like the East Fulham by-election of 1933 or the notorious Oxford Union ‘King and Country’ vote of the same year.† The proponents of an unqualified renunciation of armed force – men such as George Lansbury and Sir Stafford Cripps – were only a minority, even within the Labour Party. The popular alternative to rearmament was collective security, not pacifism. Thanks to organizations like the Union of Democratic Control, the National Peace Council, the League of Nations Union and the Peace Pledge Union, there was considerable public support for the League, extending across the political spectrum. As Gilbert Murray, the Chairman of the League of Nations Union, remarked in 1928, ‘All parties are pledged to the League… all Prime Ministers and ex-Prime Ministers support it… no candidate for Parliament dares oppose it openly.’ Moreover, British voters wanted a League with teeth. In 1935 over 11 million voters returned a questionnaire in the so-called ‘Peace Ballot’; over 10 million favoured non-military sanctions against an aggressor, and nearly 7 million accepted the principle of collective military action if these were not effective. The only difficulty was that no one quite knew where the League’s military capability was going to come from; it was far easier to talk about disarmament agreements. Few people wanted to face the fact that over Manchuria Japan had defied the League with impunity. The withdrawal of Japan and then Germany from the League ought to have served notice that as an institution it was defunct; Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia was the coup de grâce. For a moment it seemed that the British would use naval power and economic sanctions to enforce the writ of the League; then (with the British general election safely won) it was revealed that the Foreign Secretary Sir Samuel Hoare and the French Premier Pierre Laval had proposed a deal to give a large chunk of Abyssinia to the Italians. It was Manchukuo all over again, with the difference that a Western politician paid a price; the hapless Hoare fell on his sword. The dashing Anthony Eden took his place, pledging ‘peace through collective security’; within a few months Abyssinian resistance had collapsed and the Germans had marched into the Rhineland. Still people clung to the League rather than face the stark realities of the balance of power, which they had been promised was a thing of the past.

  It is easy to forget what a lone voice Churchill was in March 1936 when he sought to remind the Conservative Foreign Affairs Committee that ‘for four hundred years the foreign policy of England has been to oppose the strongest, most aggressive, most dominating Power on the Continent, and particularly to prevent the Low Countries falling into the hands of such a Power’. Almost no one was as enamoured as Churchill of Britain’s bellicose past. Yet, as 1940 demonstrated, that did not mean the British people were incapable of being led back to that past. As early as April 1936 Sir Alfred Zimmern told Harold Nicolson that the task of convincing the public to fight for the sake of Czechoslovakia ‘could be done in a month by wireless’. There was dissatisfaction with appeasement among Tory backbenchers almost from the moment Chamberlain became Prime Minister in 1937. And an opinion poll conducted shortly after the Austrian Anschluss (1938) revealed a growing popular disillusionment too. Asked ‘Should Great Britain promise assistance to Czechoslovakia if Germany acts towards her as she did to Austria?’ only a minority of respondents – 43 per cent – said no. A third said yes and a quarter had no opinion. By the time Churchill rose in the Commons on March 14, 1938, to call for ‘a grand alliance’ on the basis of the League, The Economist felt that ‘his view represents the view of the majority of the nation’. By September 1938 Britain’s ambassador in Berlin Sir Nevile Henderson felt obliged to warn Ribbentrop, now Hitler’s Foreign Minister, that:

  I had noted in England with amazement and regret the growing strength and unanimity of feeling in regard to Germany. I was struck by the difference even in two months since I was last in London and it was not confined to one but to all classes and to all parties, and I had seen many people.

  More important than popular pacifism in underpinning appeasement was the fact that appeasing dictators came naturally to important sections of what a later generation would call the British Establishment. Many firms in the City of London had revived their longstanding pre-1914 links with Germany during the 1920s, only to be caught out by the German banking crisis of 1931. Around £62 million of the £100 million of commercial bills held by the London acceptance houses (the City’s principal merchant banks) were covered by the so-called ‘Standstill’ agreement of 1931, which froze all foreign credits to Germany, but allowed interest payments to continue to flow to the creditors. In all, the credits to Germany of all types had totalled £300 million, of which roughly £110 million was covered by the Standstill agreement. The agreement was renewed on an annual basis, with only around £40 million being liquidated by 1939. Throughout the 1930s, City firms lived in hope that Anglo-German trade would revive and that this would allow a liquidation of outstanding debts. At the same time, the so-called Anglo-German ‘Connection’, between the Bank of England governor Montagu Norman and his German counterpart Hjalmar Schacht, encouraged the belief that there was a moderate faction within the Nazi regime, whose fortunes would prosper if they were sufficiently rewarded. The hope was expressed by one British diplomat that bilateral economic agreements ‘would obviously have great possibilities as a stepping stone to political appeasement’. Such hopes were bolstered by the Payments Agreement of November 1934, whereby in return for a secret credit of £750,000 the Reichsbank committed itself to earmarking 55 per cent of all earnings from German exports to Britain for the use of German firms importing goods from Britain. In short, the City had strong incentives to avoid a breakdown in Anglo-German relations. Fearful of losing altogether the sums they had invested in Germany or lent to Germany before 1933, the bankers surreptitiously propped up German credit. The sums were not large (in January 1939 Sir Frederick Leith-Ross estimated potential losses in the event of a German default at £40 million of short-term bills and a further £80 or £90 million of long-term debts) but the leverage it gave Schacht was. That was why it sent a measurable shock through the London bond market – where German bonds issued under the Dawes and Young Plans continued to trade before, during and after the war – when he offered to resign as Economics Minister in August 1937 and was dismissed as Reichsbank President in January 1939.

  The bankers had little reason to like Hitler’s government. Many of the most important firms with direct or indirect exposure to Germany were owned and managed by Jewish families, and trying to salvage something from the wreckage of the Depression meant holding their noses and dealing with Schacht. The Federation of British Industries sought to negotiate agreements on prices and market shares with its German counterpart; it did so not out of love for Hitler but out of fear of losing the still large German export market or of being driven from Balkan markets by Schacht’s bilateral deals; despite the Depression, Germany’s trade remained the third largest in the world in the mid-1930s. Other Establishment groups, however, were actuated by something lower than self-interest. Aristocratic grandees, colonial press barons and society hostesses alike found that they genuinely sympathized with aspects of Hitler’s policy, including even its anti-Semitism. Lord Londonderry, Secretary of State for Air from 1931 to June 1935, who also happened to be Churchill’s cousin, was so keen on Hitler that he wrote an entire book defending the Nazi regime, including its anti-Semitic policies, which were ‘justified by the peculiar ideals of racial purity which have been inculcated and in which most Germans firmly believe to-day’. As Londonderry put it, he had ‘no great affection for the Jews’ since it was ‘possible to trace their participation in most of those international disturbances which have created so much havoc in different countries’. Viscount Halifax was another grand figure of the British aristocracy, towering in both stature and snobbery �
�� so much so that when he first met Hitler at Berchtesgaden in November 1937 he mistook him for a footman and very nearly handed him his hat and coat. Fortunately, the gaffe did not prove fatal to the cause of Anglo-German harmony. His friend Henry ‘Chips’ Channon reported that Halifax had ‘liked all the Nazi leaders, even Goebbels, and he was much impressed, interested and amused by the visit. He thinks the regime absolutely fantastic.’ Another noble Germanophile was the Duke of Westminster, who, according to Duff Cooper, ‘inveighed against the Jews and… said that after all Hitler knew that we were his best friends.’ Although Hitler’s chosen ambassador to London, Joachim von Ribbentrop,* was mocked in some newspapers as ‘Herr Brickendrop’, he was a social hit in these aristocratic circles. The Marquess of Lothian* took him under his wing, as did the Anglo-German Earl of Athlone (who had renounced the German title of Prince of Teck during the 1914–18 war), to say nothing of the shipping heiress Nancy Cunard and the Mitford sisters, Unity and Diana. Tom Jones, Baldwin’s former private secretary, was charmed by Ribbentrop’s account of Hitler as ‘a being of quite superior attainments and fundamentally an artist, widely read, passionately devoted to music and pictures’.

  It was at All Souls College, Oxford, that some of the most influential proponents of appeasement liked to convene: among the Fellows of the period were Halifax, Sir John Simon – his predecessor as Foreign Secretary and Chamberlain’s docile Chancellor of the Exchequer – and the editor of The Times, Geoffrey Dawson, who had previously been the College’s Bursar. At the end of a stressful week, Dawson liked nothing better than to repair to Oxford, to dine and sip claret in the plush parlours of his old college, where he could be sure of finding kindred spirits. In Dawson’s eyes, it was the moral duty of every British newspaper to promote harmonious relations between Britain and the new Germany. He had no compunction about toning down or spiking outright the dispatches of his newspaper’s experienced Berlin correspondent, Norman Ebbut. Some British foreign correspondents, like Sefton Delmer of the Daily Express, were positively enthusiastic about the new Germany. Not Ebbut. To him, Hitler was nothing more than a ‘Sergeant Major with a gift of the gab and a far-away look in his eyes’. Despite warnings from the Nazis to mute his criticism, and frequent raids on his apartment, Ebbut wrote regularly on (among other subjects) the new regime’s persecution of dissidents within the Protestant churches. As early as November 1934 he was moved to protest about editorial interference with his copy, giving twelve examples of how his stories had been cut to remove critical references to the Nazi regime. He complained bitterly to his American friend William Shirer that his editors did ‘not want to hear too much of the bad side of Nazi Germany’; The Times had been ‘captured by pro-Nazis in London’. By contrast, articles by Lord Lothian were prominently displayed. In one, published in February 1935, Lothian told readers that Hitler had personally assured him ‘that what Germany wants is equality, not war; that she is prepared absolutely to renounce war’. Indeed, Hitler was willing to ‘sign pacts of non-aggression with all Germany’s neighbours to prove the sincerity of his desire for peace’. All he asked was ‘equality’ in armaments. ‘I have not the slightest doubt’, averred Lothian, ‘that this attitude is perfectly sincere.’ The correct policy for Britain to adopt was ‘to turn [Germany] into a “good European” by treating her as one of the European community’. Hitler’s concern was not Western Europe, in any case, but the Soviet Union. ‘He regards Communism as essentially a militant religion,’ explained Lothian. If it were one day to ‘try to repeat the military triumphs of Islam’, would ‘Germany than be regarded as the potential enemy or as the bulwark of Europe, as the menace or the protector of the new nations of Eastern Europe?’ The Times covered the Night of the Long Knives as if it were a perfectly legitimate political act – a ‘genuine’ effort ‘to transform revolutionary fervour into moderate and constructive effort and to impose a high standard on National-Socialist officials’. In August 1937 Ebbut was expelled from Germany. Seven months later, on March 10, 1938, his editor attended Ribbentrop’s farewell reception in London. The next day German troops marched into Austria.

  It was the editorials of The Times as much as its reporting that made it more influential than its modest circulation might suggest. (As Lord Beaverbrook, the proprietor of the Daily Express once remarked, ‘The popular Press is nothing, in the way of propaganda, when compared with the unpopular newspapers.’) Here Dawson could rely on the misanthropic former diplomat and historian Edward Hallett Carr, of all the proponents of appeasement perhaps the most sophisticated. To Carr, international relations were about power, not morality. As the balance of power in the world shifted, with some powers rising and others declining, the only question was whether adjustments should be violent or peaceful. Carr’s view was that the latter were preferable. Appeasement was therefore a matter of adjusting peacefully to the reality of German (and later Soviet) power in the least bloody way, just as the British political system had adjusted to the reality of working-class power without the need for a revolution:

  In the latter part of the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth the ‘have nots’ of most countries steadily improved their position through a series of strikes and negotiations, and the ‘haves’, whether through a sense of justice, or through fear of revolution in the event of refusal, yielded ground rather than put the issue to the test of force. This process eventually produced on both sides a willingness to submit disputes to various forms of conciliation and arbitration, and ended by creating something like a regular system of ‘peaceful change’… Once the dissatisfied Powers had realized the possibility of remedying grievances by peaceful negotiation (preceded no doubt in the first instance by threats of force), some regular procedure of ‘peaceful change’ might gradually be established and win the confidence of the dissatisfied; and, once such a system had been recognized, conciliation would come to be regarded as a matter of course, and the threat of force, while never formally abandoned, would recede further into the background.

  This was a distinctly fatalistic formula for a world without war –peace on the basis of submission to the might of the dictators. Sneeringly dismissive of ‘the vague ideals of altruism and humanitarianism’, Carr applauded Hitler’s policy, arguing that the Treaty of Versailles was obsolete and that Germany had every right to expand eastwards. Chamberlain’s talks with Hitler in Munich in 1938 he hailed as ‘a model for negotiating peaceful change’.

  The Times was far from unique in its soft-soap coverage of Germany. Following his visit in 1937, Halifax lobbied nearly all the leading newspaper proprietors to tone down their coverage of Germany, even attempting to ‘get at’ David Low, the Evening Standard’s irreverent cartoonist. The government succeeded in pressurizing the BBC into avoiding ‘controversy’ in its coverage of European affairs –an irony in view of its later wartime reputation for truthful reporting. Lord Reith, the Director-General of the BBC, told Ribbentrop ‘to tell Hitler that the BBC was not anti-Nazi’. A programme in the series ‘The Way of Peace’ was dropped when the Labour MP Josiah Wedgwood refused to delete references in his contribution to Hitler and Mussolini’s policies of ‘persecution, militancy and inhumanity’. Pressure to toe the line was even stronger in the House of Commons. Conservative MPs who ventured to criticize Chamberlain were swiftly chastised by the whips or their local party associations. In this atmosphere, only a few mavericks in each party ventured to argue the case for rearmament and traditional alliances, and even Churchill –the most eloquent exponent of this view –took a less than consistent line between 1933 and 1939. As his critics pointed out, he was against self-government for India, but for Czech democracy; against the dictators, but for recognition of Franco’s regime in Spain; against arms limitation, but for the League of Nations. Chamberlain and his cronies were not above defaming Churchill in the press, and they did the same to Anthony Eden following his resignation as Foreign Secretary in February 1938.

  In All Souls, too, a number of the younger F
ellows begged to differ from the Dawson line. At around the time of the Abyssinian crisis, the historian A. L. Rowse –who was just thirty-four at the time of Munich –recalled a walk with him along the towpath to Iffley, in the course of which he warned the older man: ‘It is the Germans who are so powerful as to threaten all the rest of us together.’ Dawson’s reply was revealing: ‘To take your argumentonits own valuation– mind you, I’s m not saying that I agree with it – but if the Germans are so powerful as you say, oughtn’t we to go in with them?’ Another youthful critic of appeasement at All Souls was the brilliant explicator of political thought Isaiah Berlin, who strongly disapproved of the attitudes of Dawson and his circle. As Berlin told his biographer many years later:

  They didn’t talk about appeasement in front of all of us so very much, but they did in the privacy of their own rooms. They brought sympathizers, well-wishers, with them; then they would disappear into one of those big rooms upstairs with one of them, and there they would have practically committee meetings… On appeasement, together with everybody else of my age… I was strictly against. There were no appeasers except [Quintin] Hogg in our group. In my generation, nobody was, nor people younger than me. No no, certainly not.

  Partly because of the appeasement issue, Berlin was drawn to the left-leaning Thursday Lunch Club, among whose members were Richard Crossman, the future Labour minister, and Roy Harrod, Keynes’s biographer. Berlin was no socialist. But he had one advantage over other Oxford dons when it came to understanding what was happening on the continent. As a Jew whose family had emigrated from Latvia to escape the chaos of the Russian Revolution, he had every reason to understand what was at stake on the continent. He could see that the older Fellows continued to think of Europe in the old imperialist terms of the 1900s, which was why they were inclined to accept Hitler’s overtly racist arguments: