by C. J. Sansom
John Cornwell’s Hitler’s Pope (1999) is the best of all too many accounts of how the Vatican of Pope Pius XII collaborated with the Nazi regime and its puppets and did next to nothing to stop the Holocaust in Catholic countries, despite the efforts of some courageous local Catholics. I found the story of the extent of the Catholic Church hierarchy’s collaborationist attitude to Nazi and Fascist mass murder shocking enough in the context of the Spanish Civil War: in that of the Second World War it seems an almost indelible stain.
Which brings me, finally, to the tragic story of Slovakia and the Holocaust. The events that Natalia relates to David all happened in Slovakia in the real world, as in the alternate one. A collaborationist, nationalist anti-Semitic regime led by a Catholic priest, Father Tiso, and his second in command, the murderous Fascist Vojtech Tuka, used its own party paramilitaries, the Hlinka Guard, to load Slovak Jews onto the trains which were to carry them to the death camps in the first major deportations of the Holocaust, and also sent troops to fight in Russia. Some Slovak Catholics approved the deportations, others protested so vigorously that the deportations were – though too late for most – suspended. There is a good literature on the subject. Karen Henderson’s Slovakia: the Escape from Invisibility (2002) is a useful introduction to the country’s modern history. Mark W. Axworthy’s Axis Slovakia: Hitler’s Slavic Wedge 1938–45 (2002) tells the story of the Tiso regime. Kathryn Winter’s Katarina (1998), Gerta Vrbová’s Trust and Deceit: a Tale of Survival in Slovakia and Hungary 1939–1945 (2006) and her husband Rudolf Vrba’s I Escaped from Auschwitz (2006) tell the story from the point of view of Slovak Jews. Vrba’s story is one of the most extraordinary memoirs of the Second World War. Finally the papers in Racial Violence Past and Present (Slovak National Museum and Museum of Jewish Culture, Bratislava 2003) are a warning from history to Europe today.
Finally, and more happily, I cannot end without mentioning Robert Harris’ Fatherland (1992) – for me the best alternate history novel ever written.
Historical Note
I was born in 1952, the year in which Dominion is set. My parents met through the wartime naval posting of my father, an English Midlander, to Scotland, my mother’s home. So I am, like many British people of my generation, a child of wartime population movements.
Winston Churchill was Prime Minister when I was born, and throughout my childhood he was a revered figure. By the time I came to political awareness at the start of the 1970s, and abandoned, to their amusement and bemusement, my parents’ Conservatism for the left-wing sympathies I have retained ever since, I found a different view of Churchill in the new circles I moved in. He was, many said, a warmonger, a fanatical imperialist who opposed any progress towards Indian independence, a ferocious anti-Socialist, hammer of the workers in the General Strike of 1926 and sender of troops to shoot down miners at Tonypandy in 1910. All of these accusations are true except, oddly, the last, despite its persistence.1
There were, I think, several Churchills – not surprising for a man whose political career spanned sixty-four years and who spent his life promoting highly original ideas, some crazy, some brilliant. First there was the radical Liberal, on the left of his party, of the years before 1914. Then during and after the Great War appeared the second Churchill, the ferocious anti-Socialist and anti-Communist Conservative, unshakeable opponent of Indian political advancement, on that subject a reactionary even by the standards of his own party at the time. But from 1935 on there emerged a third Churchill, the anti-Nazi who saw that Hitler meant war and that appeasement would end in disaster.
He genuinely loathed the fanatic nationalism and anti-Semitism of the Nazis and their destruction of democracy. This Churchill appeared on anti-appeasement platforms with Labour and trade union leaders like Ernest Bevin, and in 1940 allied with Labour against large parts of his own party in his determination to rally the nation to fight the war to the last, and his speeches, personality and human skills inspired both politicians and people to do just that. In old age, during his second premiership of 1951–55, a fourth Churchill appeared, his politics turned centrist and consensual, and who in 1949 admitted to Jawaharlal Nehru that he had done him great wrong.2
It is of course undeniable that throughout his days Churchill was an old-fashioned British imperialist, and that ideas of British exceptionalism were at the forefront of his wartime speeches. So it may seem odd that in this book, whose overarching theme is the dangers and evils of politics based on nationalism and race, Churchill appears as a heroic figure. But it should be remembered that Churchill was never a narrow nationalist, and in 1940–5 he always saw Britain in the context of the wider European and world struggle. This is shown in his June 1940 speech which I have chosen as the aphorism for this book; he saw with vivid clarity the darkness that Nazism and the Nazis had brought to Europe and which would continue to spread if they were not stopped.
I have always been fascinated by the notion of alternate history – how the world might have changed had one seminal event turned out differently. And sometimes, as in May 1940, the history of the world does indeed seem to turn on a sixpence. Of course the story told here, of the events that followed Churchill failing to become Prime Minister, is only an alternate history, not the alternate history, for there can be no such thing. Every imagined change to history, every road not taken, opens up probabilities and likelihoods to the historian, but never certainties. I think, however, that Churchill was right in believing that if Britain had accepted German peace overtures in 1940 it would inevitably have become dominated by Nazi Germany. The world I have created is only one of the scenarios that might have followed, though I believe a likely one.
And so, to turn to that crucial moment in the history of the real world, when Churchill became Prime Minister instead of Lord Halifax. Between 1935, when Fascist aggression in Europe began with Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, and March 1939, when Hitler finally destroyed Czechoslovakia, the policy of appeasement was supported by a majority within the ruling British National Government, a coalition with a large majority which had been in power since 1931. It was overwhelmingly Conservative but included a small number of important Labour and Liberal defectors.
Appeasement was not then a dirty word – it meant, broadly, to seek peace by negotiating peaceful solutions to international problems. People were appeasers from a number of often very different motives. One should never underestimate the importance of the memory of the horrors of the Great War, and the perfectly reasonable dread that with advancing technology, especially in the air, a second European war would be even more cataclysmic and involve the bombing of civilians with high explosives and, it was feared, poison gas. Stanley Baldwin was right when he said, in 1932, that ‘the bomber will always get through.’
Then there were those who thought the Treaty of Versailles, severing German territories from the Reich in a treaty that otherwise idolized the principle of national self-determination, unfair. And there were many, particularly Conservatives, who while they disliked the Nazi regime, and thought its leaders common and thuggish, felt it was not up to them to interfere in German domestic affairs and saw the Nazis as a bulwark against the threat of communism. Lord Halifax, just before visiting Hitler as Foreign Secretary in 1937, wrote that ‘Nationalism and Racialism is a powerful force but I can’t feel that it’s either unnatural or immoral!’, and added this comment shortly after: ‘I cannot myself doubt that these fellows are genuine haters of communism.’3
We know now, more accurately than people did in the 1930s, how appallingly murderous the regime that Lenin and Stalin had created actually was, but in the 1930s it was no possible military threat to the West. The widespread fears on the British right of communism spreading at home were a chimera.
Then there were others who positively admired Nazism. Lloyd George, Prime Minister during the Great War, called Hitler also ‘unquestionably a great leader’ and ‘the greatest German of the age’.4 There were Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts, supported for a ti
me by Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail, and Hitler also had influential admirers in business and on the wealthy aristocratic right. There were very few Labour politicians who had any good words for the Nazis, but there were one or two, notably Ben Greene, quite an important figure for a while in the 1930s. In Dominion he becomes Labour leader in the pro-Treaty coalition.
Then there were the pacifists, whose opposition to war in any form was total, even after the Second World War began. Pacifism within the Labour Party had been strong in the early 1930s, but declined as Fascist aggression grew, particularly with the Spanish Civil War. Pacifism remained as a force, though, both within and outside the Labour Party. The position taken by people like Vera Brittain and the minority of some twenty Labour MPs who formed the Parliamentary Peace Aims Group was courageous given the atmosphere of the time, but the Peace Aims Group would undoubtedly have voted for a treaty in 1940, and lived – though perhaps not for long – to regret it.
At Munich in 1938, Chamberlain believed that by ceding the predominantly German-speaking areas of Czechoslovakia to Hitler, he had met the Führer’s last demand. When, the following spring, Hitler occupied the remaining Czech lands and set up Slovakia as a puppet state, Chamberlain realized he had been deceived. When he went on to invade Poland in September 1939 Chamberlain declared war, but he was a reluctant and ineffective war leader. His long-held hopes for peace gone, he became a tragic figure. When, in spring 1940, Chamberlain said that Hitler had ‘missed the bus’ for a spring offensive only for the Germans immediately to invade Denmark and Norway, and British military operations in Norway ended in disaster, his position as Prime Minister came under threat. A large minority of Conservative MPs voted against the government or abstained in the Norway Debate in Parliament in May 1940. Chamberlain turned to the Labour leaders with the offer of a coalition; they agreed to serve, but only under a different Conservative leader. Chamberlain realized he would have to go.
Thus followed the fateful meeting of 9 May 1940 between Chamberlain, the Conservative Chief Whip David Margesson, and the two leading candidates for the succession, Halifax and Churchill. Each of the participants left a record of what happened, which differ considerably in detail but not in essentials.5 Edward Wood, Lord Halifax, Chamberlain’s Foreign Secretary, had the premiership for the asking. He was patrician, experienced, trusted, reliable and respected, though he had been a leading appeaser and there was sometimes an odd element of passivity in his nature. He was supported by the bulk of the Conservative party, Chamberlain, and the King. His junior minister, Rab Butler, had spent the previous evening imploring him to accept the premiership. Labour sat on their hands between the two candidates. Churchill, on the other hand, who had been brought back into the Cabinet when war was declared, was tough, pugnacious, brilliantly creative and popular with the public; but had a reputation among Conservatives as serially disloyal, an ex-Liberal, an unreliable adventurer who had (as he did) some questionable friends.
But Halifax did not press for the position, and agreed to serve under Churchill. He seems to have realized that he did not have the personality to fight the titanic struggle that was coming; the very next day the Germans invaded the Low Countries and France. He also suffered at times of crisis from agonizing, probably psychosomatic, stomach pains. Honourably, he stood aside. Churchill became Prime Minister and entered the House of Commons to loud cheers from the Labour benches, but few from the Conservatives. They took a long time to learn to love him.
Churchill immediately appointed a new War Cabinet, the central core of ministers to direct the war. Besides himself, Halifax and Chamberlain remained for the Conservatives – other prominent appeasers were cast out (Sir Samuel Hoare suddenly found himself ambassador to Franco’s Spain) – and Churchill appointed two Labour members, the party leader Clement Attlee and his deputy Arthur Greenwood. This was more than Labour were strictly entitled to, given their level of parliamentary representation, but it was a shrewd move – Churchill had not been a politician for forty years for nothing – because both were anti-appeasers who could be relied on to support him in prosecuting the war vigorously. It gave him a majority in the War Cabinet, and Chamberlain too, though now terminally ill, showed a new resolution. This was needed. By the end of May 1940 British and French forces were in full retreat, the British to Dunkirk. At this point Germany made peace overtures, as they did again later in 1940, the thrust of which was that Hitler, who had never wanted war against his fellow Aryan nation, would leave the British Empire alone in return for a free hand in Europe. Halifax wanted these overtures to be followed up; it seemed the war in the West was lost and perhaps now was the time to try to settle and avoid further bloodshed. Churchill argued, though, that a peace treaty would inevitably lead to German domination of Britain and that with her navy and air force, supported (though in some cases not wholeheartedly) by the Empire and with the protection of the Channel, she should fight on and face invasion if need be. Churchill won the day and obtained support of the full Cabinet. The rest is history.
Had Halifax become Prime Minister, the outcome would likely have been very different. He would have appointed a different War Cabinet, with a different balance. It might well have negotiated peace when France surrendered. If that had happened I think both the Labour and Conservative parties would have split, a Labour minority following most Conservatives into a pro-Treaty coalition. I believe King George VI would have stayed – constitutionally he would have had to support the decision of his government – and carried on as King, however reluctantly as the regime hardened. I have never bought the idea that the Germans, had Britain surrendered or been defeated, would have restored King Edward VIII, though certainly the Nazis played with that idea. True, Edward was pro-Nazi, but many in Britain loathed him for abdicating and he was such an irresponsible and foolish man that, as King, he would have been a headache to any government.
Deciding who Britain’s political leaders might have been in the years that followed is difficult. Even if people are long dead one is reluctant to label them unfairly. Faced with the realities of what the Treaty brought about in the circumstances of this book, I think Halifax would have resigned in guilt and despair. Chamberlain died late in 1940 and as for the other leading candidate to succeed Halifax, Sir Samuel Hoare, I am conscious that his first-hand experience of fascism in Spain turned him into an anti-Fascist. I have portrayed Herbert Morrison, who was anti-Fascist but saw himself as a realist and was always consumed by the lust for power, as leading the Labour pro-Treaty minority but, like Halifax, later resigning in despair. Lloyd George, however, I am sure would have loved a late return to power and there is no question of his sympathies with Hitler.
As for the man who succeeds Lloyd George in Dominion, if one is looking for an appeaser in love with power, fanatical about a united British Empire setting up tariffs against the rest of the world, and a man who was irredeemably corrupt and unscrupulous (he left his native Canada under a cloud over the circumstances in which he had made a business fortune), the obvious candidate has to be Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook. Clement Attlee, who did not say such things lightly, described him as the only evil person he had ever met, a judgement shared by others,6 although Churchill was, from time to time, friendly with him. To be fair, Beaverbrook was never an active anti-Semite, but nor did he like Jews and nor was the issue particularly important to him. From the Great War until the early 1930s he was the epitome of the newspaper magnate who successfully interfered in politics, until Stanley Baldwin courageously squashed him when he described newspaper proprietors as having ‘power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages’. No single newspaper proprietor had such power again until the years following Margaret Thatcher’s victory in 1979 when she, followed by Tony Blair (and Alex Salmond of the SNP), handed ever-increasing amounts of influence to Rupert Murdoch.
Enoch Powell was always the most fanatic of British nationalists, and though in the 1960s he became the ultimate British isolationist, while at
the Conservative Research Department in the late 1940s he was a passionate imperialist. He sent a paper to Churchill, then the Leader of the Opposition, in 1946 advising the military reconquest of India, which made Churchill worry about his sanity, though Rab Butler managed to reassure him.7 Powell seems to me an obvious candidate for India Secretary. Rab Butler later became a leading Conservative moderate, but he was the most passionate of appeasers before 1939, a fact which earned him the lasting enmity of Harold Macmillan, who hated fascism.
The Scottish Nationalist Party was formed in 1934 through the merger of two small parties, the right-wing Scottish Party and the leftish National Party of Scotland. The new party, which remained very small, included elements sympathetic to fascism, but had no common policies on the serious issues of the day – mass unemployment, the continuing Depression and the darkening international scene – beyond the dream, common to all nationalist and Fascist parties throughout Europe, that the expression of nationhood would release some sort of a mystical ‘national spirit’ that would somehow resolve all problems. The struggle against fascism was no priority for them; in 1939 the Party Conference voted to oppose conscription. Their leader, Douglas Young, was imprisoned for his refusal to be conscripted on the grounds that there existed no Scottish government to decide on it. The SNP’s 1939 resolution and subsequent behaviour show the unimportance fighting fascism had for them, while the rest of the British people, like my Scottish mother and English father, were either working their fingers to the bone on the home front or serving in the forces to fight the greatest threat civilization has ever faced.