Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (46 page)

On 1 August 1940, Goering ordered Reinhard Heydrich of the Reich Central Security Office (RSHA) to ‘commence activities simultaneously with the military invasion in order to seize and combat effectively the numerous important organisations and societies in England which are hostile to Germany’. These were to include trade unions, masonic lodges, public schools, the Church of England and even the Boy Scout movement. Six
Einsatzkommandos
were to be set up to coordinate the liquidation of Germany’s political enemies. These were to be in London, Bristol, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester and Edinburgh (or Glasgow if the Forth Bridge had been destroyed). The SS colonel whom Heydrich appointed as SS and Higher Police Leader to oversee the operation was Dr Franz-Alfred Six, former dean of Berlin University’s economics faculty. In the event, Six ended up in Smolensk rather than London, where he was responsible for the massacre of numerous Soviet commissars, crimes for which he was subsequently sentenced to twenty years in prison.
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To help Six identify individuals as well as organisations, the RHSA drew up a list of 2,820 names and addresses for people who were to be taken into ‘protective custody’. This
Sonderfahndungsliste GB -
the ‘Special Search List’ or ’Black Book’ - was a rushed job: Sigmund Freud had died in September 1939, for example, and Lytton Strachey in 1932. Nevertheless, it shows who the Nazis considered were their potential enemies, not just in politics but in the cultural and literary worlds as well. In addition to obvious political figures - including Churchill, Eden, Masaryk, Beneš and de Gaulle - the list named H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley (who had been living in America since 1936), J. B. Priestley, C. P. Snow and Stephen Spender, as well as the émigré art historian Fritz Saxl and the left-wing publisher Victor Gollancz.
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When Rebecca West discovered that she and Noël Coward were on the list she telegraphed: ‘My dear, the people we should have been seen dead with!’ It was perhaps optimistic to expect ‘Churchill, Winston Spencer, Ministerpräsident’ to be waiting patiently at ‘Chartwell Manor, Westerham, Kent’ to be arrested, but the list gives a good indication of how thoroughly the Nazis intended to purge the upper echelons of British public life. Those who advocated peace with Germany were conspicuously absent from the list, including prominent individuals such as George Bernard Shaw (who had written in the New
Statesmen
on 7 October 1939: ‘Our business is to make peace with him’) and David Lloyd George (who had declared in 1936: ‘He is indeed a great man. Führer is the proper name for him, for he is a born leader - yes, a statesman’).
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The game of attempting to identify who would actually have collaborated with the Germans has been described by Sir Isaiah Berlin as ‘the most vicious an Englishman can play’.
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Although the administration of the country could have been undertaken by the usual pathetic collection of fascist fanatics, passed-over civil servants and ambitious malcontents, some nationally recognisable figureheads would have been essential in establishing the quisling state’s political legitimacy in the eyes of the populace. As we have seen, the man best placed to achieve this would have been the Duke of Windsor, who privately opposed the war in 1939 and even in December 1940 was telling American journalists off the record that Britain should come to terms with Hitler to prevent the otherwise inevitable triumph of Bolshevism. Recent, sensationalist accounts of the Duke’s remarks and actions in the summer of 1940 have given an exaggerated impression of his complicity with the Nazis. All serious historians of the period are agreed that, for all his vanity and naivety, he did nothing treacherous.
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But what he might have done if England had fallen is another question. Had Ribbentrop flatteringly presented the Duke, who was in the South of France in late May - and more pertinently perhaps the Duchess in her role as Lady Macbeth - with the opportunity of returning to a vacant throne as the binder of the nation’s wounds, they might easily have accepted. The Duke could have justified his decision as an attempt to keep the British Empire - which Hitler consistently proclaimed he felt no antipathy towards - together and functioning as a viable world force. The restored Duke’s regime would, of course, have depended upon renouncement of the four-year-old Instrument of Abdication. The full force of Goebbels’ propaganda machine - run, perhaps, by William Joyce (‘Lord Haw-Haw’) as Director-General of the BBC - would have been directed towards altering British perceptions of the Abdication. We know roughly the line that would have been taken, because in September 1940 Joyce published his political testament
Twilight over England
. In it he wrote:

Thus Edward VIII’s return to the throne would have been represented as a democratic initiative.

Through the bewilderment, demoralisation and despair attendant upon a British defeat, some collaborators would doubtless have emerged with broadly patriotic (if misguided) motives. In his novel
A Question of Loyalties
, the writer Allan Massie portrayed some of the Vichy leaders, at least at the beginning, as motivated primarily by a desire to protect their defeated people, once the German victory had become a
fait accompli
.
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‘The King’s government’, it would have been argued in Britain, ‘must be carried on,’ and precedents from 1688 and even the Wars of the Roses would doubtless have been invoked to legitimise the new regime. Candidates for the role of the British Pétain usually include Lloyd George, Sir Oswald Mosley, Sir Samuel Hoare - none of whom featured in the RHSA’s ‘Black Book’ - and Lord Halifax, who did. Lloyd George was, like Pétain, a Great War hero; he was also a former Prime Minister. Hitler believed he could work with him, telling Martin Bormann in January 1942, ‘If Lloyd George had the necessary power, he would certainly have been the architect of a German-English understanding.‘
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The Germans knew he was sceptical about the war, and he would have undoubtedly have been their first choice. ’If the chances are against,‘ Lloyd George had told Harold Nicolson on the outbreak of war, ’then we should certainly make peace at the earliest opportunity.‘
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He said as much again in the House of Commons on 3 October 1939. By August 1940, Beaverbrook believed that ‘the public are divided into two camps; there are the people who think Winston should bring him in and other people who think Hitler will put him in’.
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Lloyd George himself, who in October 1940 told his secretary, ‘I shall wait until Winston is bust,’ might well have persuaded himself that it was his duty to return to power in order to vitiate the worst aspects of German direct rule.
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By contrast, it is doubtful that, even if he had been prepared to serve (which is unlikely considering his orders of 9 May 1940 to fight ‘until the foreigner was driven from our soil’), Mosley would have been chosen to govern Britain.
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The BUF’s dismal political record in peacetime would have left any Blackshirt ministry far too transparently a puppet government and, as was shown in France, the Germans wanted legitimacy, however bogus, above all. Always more an admirer of Mussolini than Hitler, Mosley’s stock was not particularly high with the Germans by the outbreak of war. In December 1940, in his cross-examination of Mosley, Norman Birkett KC accepted that he could ‘entirely dismiss’ any suggestion that Mosley was a traitor who would have taken up arms and fought on the Germans’ side had they landed.
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In any case, Mosley himself, who was interned on 22 May 1940, might well have been found hanged in his Brixton jail cell by the time the Germans arrived, such was his unpopularity as a result of his pre-war activities, his arrest and the sustained campaign against him in the press.

The extremely vain Sir Samuel Hoare, formerly a leading appeaser, but by late May British ambassador in Madrid, was also someone Hitler hoped might replace Churchill as Prime Minister.
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He would have been flattered by an approach. R. A. Butler, the Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, was another politician for whom
Realpolitik
mattered more than emotion. He told the Swedish envoy, Byorn Prytz, on 17 June that his ‘official attitude will for the present be that the war should continue, but he must be certain that no opportunity should be missed of compromise if reasonable conditions could be agreed and no diehards would be allowed to stand in the way’.
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Butler was the master of compromise who saw politics as ‘the art of the possible’, and was suspicious of conviction politicians like Churchill. He further told Prytz that ‘common sense and not bravado’ must govern the actions of the government in its dealings with Germany. When asked about just such a Vichy Britain situation, his friend and colleague Enoch Powell said, elliptically, ‘Rab was an administrator.’
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As keen on appeasement as Chamberlain himself, Butler might well have felt that it was his patriotic duty to do what he could to relieve the anguish of the British people by establishing a viable
modus operandi
with the conquerors.

Halifax, on the other hand, would probably have been the man chosen by Churchill to accompany the King and Queen (whom he knew well) to Canada to organise continued extra-metropolitan resistance. As a former Under-Secretary at the Colonial Office, Viceroy of India and now Foreign Secretary since early 1938, Halifax had a wide knowledge of the empire and personal knowledge of those colonial politicians with whom a Free British government would have had to deal. If he could have been persuaded to leave his beloved Yorkshire he would probably have become Prime Minister of the government-in-exile. The support he had enjoyed across the political spectrum in early May, when he ceded the premiership to Churchill, would have reverted back to him had Churchill perished. The only other potential leader, Neville Chamberlain, was dying of cancer. He was incapacitated by October and dead by November.

Had the Germans adopted the same policy as they did in France, occupying the industrialised, highly populated part of the country and the national capital themselves, and choosing a country spa town as the capital of the puppet regime, Britain’s Vichy could well have been Harrogate. The vast Victorian hotels, such as the Cairn, Crown, Majestic, Old Swan, Granby and Imperial, might have housed the ministries of Agriculture, Health, Transport and Interior. Foreign and defence policy would have been run from London by Brauchitsch or whoever else Hitler created General Governor or Reich Protektor. Whereas the French Republic finally dissolved itself in a converted cinema, the rump House of Commons would at least have had the Royal Baths Assembly Rooms.

An important consideration for any British politician taking over either the ‘Vichy’ government or the Canadian government-in-exile would have been the status of the empire. Despite Hitler’s 1937 offer to ‘guarantee’ it, and his positive allusions to it in his peace offer speech of 6 October 1939, it is unlikely that the empire could have been maintained under any meaningful British control for long. Had Hitler turned his attentions towards the United States after defeating Russia, Britain’s Caribbean bases would have been invaluable forward ports for the German navy. The British Empire, as was the case with the French, would also have been the most likely area of conflict between the two British governments. If both the Harrogate (Vichy) government and the Ottawa (Free British) government had laid claim to India and other British possessions, friction would inevitably have arisen, as it did between the Vichyites and Free French in Africa from 1940 to 1942. Setting Briton against Briton would have been the ultimate victory for the Nazis.

It is easier to predict the explanation which Goebbels would have presented to the British people for their catastrophe. He would have encouraged them to blame their defeat on the Jews, socialists, vacillating democratic ‘Old Gang’ politicians, Churchillian warmongers, arms-manufacturing Yankee capitalists, foreign financiers and so on. He would also have argued that the royal family and Halifax had taken a cowardly escape route. (One can almost hear Lord Haw-Haw’s nasal sneers at their ‘chicken-run’.) But a new hope would also have been offered; as Joyce put it in his book, ‘The defeat of England will be her victory.’ Joseph Chamberlain’s talk of an Anglo-German alliance at the turn of the century would have been resuscitated and ‘successfully’ negotiated between Lloyd George and Hitler. The Germans and British would have been portrayed as natural Aryan allies against Bolshevik Slavs and capitalist Americans. The medium Goebbels would have chosen to disseminate his message, besides the wireless, was known elsewhere in occupied Europe as the ‘reptile’ press. In Occupied Poland the General Government ran eight (fairly identical) dailies in different cities, as well as six periodicals. These were written by Germans who had lived in Poland before the war, aided by about 120 Poles. A score of politically neutral professional magazines, covering subjects as varied as midwifery and poultry-breeding, were also tolerated.
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The British ‘reptile’ press, like the Polish, would have subtly changed its tune had the Germans begun to suffer the same reverses on the Eastern Front as they did in 1943. The emphasis would have begun to shift away from the glories of German arms and culture towards the common ‘pan-European struggle against Bolshevism’. The emphasis which Vichy propagandists placed on a common European future as the catalyst by which honour and self-respect could be restored would have been repeated word for word in Britain. ‘Instead of maintaining European rivalries’, Hitler told Martin Bormann, ‘Britain ought to do her utmost to bring about a unification of Europe. Allied to a United Europe, she would then still retain the chance of being able to play the part of arbiter in world affairs.’ In 1942, Dr Walther Funk, the Reich Economics Minister and President of the Reichsbank, wrote the first chapter of a book entitled
Europäische Wirtschaftsgesellschaft
(European Economic Society) in which he called for a European single currency. Other chapters set out the Nazi blueprint for a common agricultural policy, an exchange rate mechanism, a single market and a central bank. Dr Anton Reithinger of the chemical giant IG-Farben wrote a chapter entitled ‘The New Europe and its Common Aspects’.
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New European Order aspirations would have been sedulously fostered by Nazi propaganda, partly to make British defeat more palatable, partly as a figleaf for the nakedness of German
imperium
, and partly as a way to promote anti-Slav and anti-American sentiment.