Nazi Princess (13 page)

Rothermere’s motives in cultivating close relations with Hitler, by wholeheartedly supporting Hitler’s policies and using his newspapers as a mouthpiece for the Nazi leader’s views, are not easy to fathom. In Rothermere’s opinion he was using his influence in a sincere attempt to avoid future bloodshed. But the supportive terms of some of his private correspondence with Hitler might well have been regarded, certainly by 1938, as beyond negotiating for an understanding between Britain and Germany, and verging on downright disloyalty. The press baron believed a firm alliance between a strengthened Germany and an adequately rearmed Britain was a guarantee of peace in Europe, and a bulwark against the spread of communism. While appeasing Hitler he was also profoundly convinced it was in Britain’s interests to rearm, particularly by building up Britain’s air power and extending the Royal Navy’s submarine fleet. To this extent he was a patriot. But wooing Hitler, long past the point at which it should have been obvious Hitler’s policies were moving against Britain’s interests, was tantamount to flirting with treachery, particularly in view of the huge influence he wielded through his massmedia newspapers.

In many respects Rothermere was a visionary. He could show remarkable foresight in predicting events to come. But he was spectacularly wrong in October 1929 when he wrote a leader in the
Daily Mail
entitled ‘Does Germany mean Peace?’ His prediction was that Germany quite definitely did mean peace: ‘She means it for the simple reason war has failed. In 1914 the Germans tried to dominate Europe by military conquest. Now they are working for the same end by industrial conquest. Germany will not again stake its fortune on a chance that proved so costly and complete a failure. If Germany could not win in 1914 with resources intact and preparations complete, her prospects of victory now with a military system so disorganised and disarmed, are hopeless and must long remain so.’
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It was his conviction that the Weimar Republic had learned a bitter lesson – that military aggression never solved anything – that made Rothermere accept Hitler’s peaceful intentions. As it turned out, the Second World War was declared a decade later.

Rothermere was right, however, in 1930. In September that year he was sending a dispatch to the
Daily Mail
from Munich, stating that ‘the gains made by Adolf Hitler’s young supporters have so thrilled the German nation that if new elections were held the National Socialists would emerge as definitely the strongest party in the state’.
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A report in the
New York Times
noted Rothermere’s prediction that within the next few years, the forces at work in Germany will have altered not a few features of the map of Europe; features which politicians assembled in Paris in 1919 complacently believed had been fixed forever. ‘They should set themselves to examine diligently the potential sources of conflagration which are smouldering beneath the present peaceful surface of Europe. Sooner or later a terrible awakening is in store for Europe.’
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Rothermere was not naive. Despite espousing Hitler’s policies far too enthusiastically for both his own and his country’s good, as war looked more and more inevitable he saw it his duty to pass on to the British government any information he learnt through his German connections. Too often British ministers and their senior civil servants preferred to ignore his warnings. They saw him as a maverick, someone outside the Establishment. When it came to rearmament, for which Rothermere was an early advocate, the politicians should have listened more intently.

There is no question that Rothermere positively admired the German chancellor. He believed that Hitler was driven by ideology; that Hitler was strong, talented, and had intense conviction in his policies. In comparison, he thought the majority of British politicians, with the exception of Churchill, were weak and lacked the unshakeable belief the Nazi leader showed. He believed if Hitler was offered friendship and allowed the freedom to carry out his expansionist policies in Eastern Europe, he could confront and destroy Bolshevism. It would be in Britain’s interests and the best chance of avoiding a second major war. Earlier, Rothermere had hailed Mussolini when he came to power, and he was not alone in doing that. In the late 1920s Churchill had praised Mussolini too. ‘Fascism has rendered a service to the entire world,’ he is reported to have written to the Italian dictator. ‘If I were Italian I am sure I would have been with you entirely.’ Two years after Hitler’s rise to power, Churchill seemed uncertain what Germany with Hitler as chancellor would mean to the world. Would he ‘be the man who will once again let loose upon the world another war’, or would he ‘go down in history as the man who restored honour and peace of mind to the great Germanic nation and brought it back serene, helpful and strong, to the forefront of the European family circle’?
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Rothermere was far from alone in dreading the possibility of another war in Europe and wanting to do all he could to ensure it could never happen. The widespread notion in Britain was that any future war would be even worse than the war that had decimated a generation just a few years earlier. To the horrendous slaughter on the battlefield would be added the unspeakable destruction that a further conflict would wreak from the air. Based on the experience of the Spanish Civil War, it was widely estimated that the first few weeks of a German air assault would result in incalculable casualties among the civilian population. Those who feared German air attack in the 1930s, in much the same way that fear of nuclear attack dominated the Cold War years, had not fully appreciated that until the German Air Force had access to forward airfields in France, their aircraft did not have the range to mount sustained aerial attacks on major cities in Britain. The assumptions of devastating bombardment from the air were exaggerated, but fear of a new and horrific means of warfare against the civilian population fuelled a policy of appeasement which had considerable support amongst the public and politicians.

Critics today might say the appeasement policy of the British government between the wars constituted a huge foreign policy betrayal. But without the advantage of foresight, and viewed from the perspective of the times, it was a policy many in Britain felt more than justified in pursuing. The truth was British politicians underestimated their adversary. They were slow to detect his cunning, and only realised his untrustworthiness when it was too late. Although the extent of Nazi intentions was not fully apparent before 1939, every one of Hitler’s foreign policy initiatives up until then, with perhaps the sole exception of the Prague coup, could be explained away by the appeasers as a legitimate policy of righting the wrongs of the Versailles treaty. For his part, Hitler, once war had broken out, considered the British leaders as criminals. ‘They could have had peace on the most agreeable terms,’ he said. ‘But there are some people whom you can talk sense into only after you’ve knocked out their front teeth.’ Nevertheless, the British government cannot say it was not warned.

The Cambridge historian Christopher Andrew records in his book,
The Defence of the Realm: The Authorised History of MI5
, that from 1935 onwards MI5 had an informant inside the German Embassy in London, a diplomat by the name of Wolfgang zu Putlitz.
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He consistently provided clear warning, as first Leopold von Hoesch and then Ribbentrop were German ambassadors in London, that negotiations with Hitler were likely to be fruitless and the only way to deal with the Nazi dictator was to stand firm. By 1938 he was flagging to his contacts that Britain, through her policy of appeasement, was ‘letting the trump cards fall out of her hands. If she had adopted, or even now adopted, a firm attitude and threatened war, Hitler would not succeed in this kind of bluff.’ MI5’s frustration over the government’s failure to take heed of the intelligence it was receiving from Putlitz and other agents resulted in an unusually frank and hard-hitting report to government. MI5 never usually commented in explicit and forthright terms. But this time the agency did not hide its concerns. The MI5 report stressed how exasperated their agent was. It appeared to him, they said, useless trying to help the British withstand Nazi ploys. MI5 said information received from Putlitz had always proved to be accurate and free of bias. Intelligence from another agent, who had risked his life to communicate it, had also called for a ‘stiff attitude on the part of Britain to resist Hitler’s demands’. In essence, British policy during the Munich crisis had convinced Hitler of England’s weakness; that the English were decadent and lacked the will to defend themselves and their empire.

MI5 were desperate to harden Chamberlain’s will and make clear that appeasement, far from achieving ‘peace for our time’, was bolstering Hitler’s aggressive policies. There was every reason to believe the Nazi dictator was only in the first stages of his planned programme of territorial expansion. Their extraordinary note quoted Hitler as saying: ‘If I were Chamberlain I would not delay for a minute to prepare my country in the most drastic way for a total war … It is astounding how easy the democracies make it for us to reach our goal.’ MI5’s note went on: ‘If the information which has proved generally reliable and accurate in the past is to be believed, Germany is at the beginning of a Napoleonic era and her rulers contemplate a great expansion of German power.’ When even these stark warnings apparently failed to shake Chamberlain out of his policy of appeasement, MI5 officers decided to emphasise to Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, how insultingly Hitler was referring to Chamberlain behind his back. The Nazi leader, MI5 said, habitually described the British Prime Minister as an ‘arsehole’, a word Halifax had probably never seen written down in his life before, and certainly never in an official internal government communication! Halifax was so shocked, as MI5 intended he should be, that he underlined the word three times in red pencil. He then showed it to the Prime Minister, who was infuriated by Hitler’s crude name-calling and his mockery of the British Prime Minister’s ‘umbrella pacifism’. Nevertheless, MI5 were convinced that Chamberlain’s policy during the Munich crisis gave Hitler the confirmation he wanted of the weakness of Great Britain and her lack of will to defend the British Empire.

Like Chamberlain, Rothermere was duped into thinking that Hitler was a man of reason and able to compromise; a man who could be trusted to keep his word. While he was unguarded in his dealings with the Nazi leadership, he was foolish in his trust of Princess Stephanie. Had he known how keenly MI5 had been watching his titled go-between ever since she had first become involved with him and the
Daily Mail
, he would perhaps have been a great deal more circumspect in his dealings with her. He was allowing himself to be the ‘fall guy’ in Nazi hands. Why, since MI5 clearly had legitimate misgivings about her, was Rothermere not taken on one side and warned? Was it because he had plenty of friends in high places? Rothermere sometimes gave the impression of a man with a split mind. He adopted one approach when dealing with the Nazi Führer and his fellow National Socialists, and another, far more realistic one, for domestic appearance. In October 1934, several months after The Night of the Long Knives, Rothermere was writing with remarkable foresight to Neville Chamberlain, who at the time was Chancellor of the Exchequer:

The oligarchs of Germany are the most dangerous, ruthless men who have ever been in charge of the fortunes of a people 67,000,000 in number. They will stop at nothing. Violent as they were on 30th of June in internal politics, they will be equally or more violent in external politics.
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Yet at the very same time, Rothermere was still corresponding with Nazi leaders in friendly, supportive and encouraging terms.

The government chose to regard some of Rothermere’s warnings as alarmist. In 1933 he had predicted that: ‘Hitlerism means war. Unlike the last war, the next war will be fought with the entire concurrence and endeavour of every German man, woman and child.’
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But such stark predictions did not appear in the editorial columns of the
Daily Mail
. His reason for maintaining close relations with Herr Hitler, he said in a letter to Lady Vansittart, wife of the Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, was in the hope that he would be in a position to exert influence on the German leader if the need arose. ‘When the emergency comes,’ he wrote, ‘this relationship might be of great value to this country. My policy is quite clear. It is to endeavour to keep on friendly terms with Germany, but to say all the time that circumstances and not personalities rule events.’
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For his part, Hitler praised what Rothermere was doing. Naturally, it was hugely valuable in assisting the Nazi leader’s expansionist ambitions. The Reich Chancellor once remarked to Ribbentrop (who passed it on to Ward Price, one of Rothermere’s most trusted journalists and Hitler’s favourite British reporter) that he had the greatest admiration for the newspaper owner. ‘He is the only Englishman who sees clearly the magnitude of this Bolshevist danger,’ Hitler said. ‘His paper is doing an immense amount of good.’ Hitler generally detested journalists, but at an event in the Deutsch Hofhe he was seen to embrace Price, affectionately holding him by the shoulders with both hands and loudly proclaiming his friendship.

Rothermere’s patience was sorely tried by Britain’s refusal to rearm realistically, even in the face of conclusive evidence that the Nazis were dangerously set on breaking the fragile peace that had existed since the end of the First World War. His policy, he said, was to speak to the Nazis using ‘the language of butter because these dictators live in such an atmosphere of adulation and awe-struck reverence that the language of guns may not go nearly as far’.
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Rothermere’s ‘soft soap’ policy was certainly fawning. ‘I esteem it a great honour and privilege to be in correspondence with Your Excellency,’ he wrote to ‘My Dear Führer’ on 20 April 1935. ‘It is not often that anyone has an opportunity of learning the views of one who may occupy the first place in all European history.’
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In December the same year he made very clear to Hitler the terms of their correspondence. ‘Any information you might give me, my dear Reichskanzler, will be dealt with, as you know, only in the way you may desire.’ What an opportunity for the Nazi dictator – access to mass-circulation newspapers in Britain, and on his own terms!
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