Hugh Greene, having spent five years speaking his mind about German politics in the Daily Telegraph, might have thought himself lucky to leave the country alive after announcing his intentions of coming back as a Gauleiter. But Greene, for all his forthright statements, never risked more than a brisk attack of local censorship. Antagonising the English did not form a part of the project of the man who had written in Mein Kampf that – of all Germany’s neighbours – ‘the last practicable tie remains with England’.1 Far from it. Hitler, from his first months in power, had gone out of his way to win England’s approval.
In May 1939, when Greene was asked to leave Berlin, the plans outlined so clearly in Mein Kampf were well under way; England, while unhappy about the invasion of Czechoslovakia that had taken place two months earlier, still wore a friendly face. Hitler’s projections for the bloodless expansion of German territory had worked out as he had expected, and with – so far – remarkably little opposition from abroad or even from within Europe. In March 1936, a small contingent of troops had reclaimed the Rhineland for Germany; in March 1938, the so-called Anschluss (Union) with Austria had passed off without difficulty; six months later, England had approved Germany’s occupation of the mountainous north and west borderlands of Czechoslovakia, known as the Sudetenland and largely inhabited by ethnic Germans. The Jews, meanwhile, as promised, had been deprived of citizenship and encouraged to depart from an expanding Germany. The alternatives (the bloody orgy of Kristallnacht, a series of linked attacks on Jewish property and the rounding-up of Jews for brutal imprisonment that masqueraded, for the benefit of the press, as repatriation) had also passed off without too much serious criticism. All, to date, had gone smoothly, and Hitler could congratulate himself upon having won as much approval from England as he required for his plans to continue: Poland was already designated for attack at the end of the summer.
Mein Kampf had clearly stated how important Hitler believed it was to win England’s trust. He had set about doing so, from his first year in power, with a double-pronged charm offensive. Putzi Hanfstaengl, coming from a high social class and speaking English with only a faint American East Coast twang, was given the task, as the Führer’s liaison officer, of winning the trust of the British aristocrats whose hands (in one of Hitler’s few mistaken assessments) clasped the reins of political power. Putzi’s introduction to Lord Redesdale’s beautiful daughter, Diana Guinness, at a smart London party did not occur by chance; Hitler, a constant visitor to Wahnfried and an admirer of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, had seen old Lord Redesdale’s photograph prominently displayed in Chamberlain’s room and on Siegfried Wagner’s desk. He sought an introduction to Redesdale’s descendants and – with a helping hand being given to Putzi by the popular and socially grander Otto von Bismarck at the German Embassy in London – it was achieved. Unity Mitford’s wholehearted commitment to extreme politics came as an entirely unlooked-for bonus.
The second line of attack was launched from the Ministry of Propaganda by Joseph Goebbels.
Today, it may seem perverse that so many British families were prepared to send their impressionable children out to complete their schooling in Germany, a country from which reports were steadily emerging of racial harassment, tyranny and torture. Should blame entirely attach to the well-meaning parents whose folly was primarily to read the wrong papers, and to place their faith in travel agencies as reputable as Thomas Cook’s? How could they know that Goebbels was subsidising Cook’s brochures, together with a series of advertisements for German tourism that England’s most respected travel agency regularly placed in The Times? In 1934, at the time of the massacre in Munich, Cook’s blandly assured nervous travellers that their own German tour guides to Germany had found ‘everything absolutely normal . . . great friendliness on all sides’.
Goebbels’s team had done their research with care. Readers of Baedeker’s 1936 guide to Germany might possibly have gleaned a hint that all was not quite normal in the Reich from the news that cameras were no longer permitted on planes and that travelling without an official escort was inadvisable. But the English middle and upper classes did not read Baedeker. They read The Times, and The Times was always eager to reassure its readers. In 1939, during a summer when even the least suspicious of English families became aware that something was amiss in the land of the Third Reich, the newspaper published a striking half-page advertisement from the German tourist board. ‘Germany! Land of Hospitality!’ it announced, before welcoming visitors to the spas of the Sudetenland.
Germany’s propaganda programme was assisted by the absence of first-hand, uncensored information in a significant part of the mainline British press. The Western Mail, publishing the reports by Gareth Jones, was regional, not major; the Manchester Guardian, in which the half-German journalist Frederick Voigt had been speaking out against the Nazi Party since 1930, was perceived as the paper of the left, representing views that were frequently dismissed as Communist. Elsewhere, British journalists went out of their way to calm and reassure, with the press barons Rothermere and Beaverbrook sharing Geoffrey Dawson’s eagerness for peace at any cost.
Among the largely rather innocent young people who travelled out to Germany during the rule of the Third Reich, a small number were making an honest endeavour to get behind the headlines and discover just what was going on. Christopher Sidgwick was an intelligent and open-minded teacher who, speaking German and wanting to see for himself what was taking place, set off on a four-month trip in 1934.
Sidgwick’s tour of Germany included moments of unexpected comedy: he found it hard to keep a straight face when, having delivered a talk on British foreign policy to a school group of Hitler Youth, he was thanked by a heartfelt rendering of ‘Pack up Your Troubles’ and ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’. He was mildly amused (while regretting the predictable absence of Mendelssohn) to find the Saxon King Alfred the Great gazing down at him from a plinth in the Valhalla, Nuremberg’s new temple to Teutonism. But Sidgwick was troubled, in 1934, to observe a new autobahn that thrust straight towards the heart of Austria. It dismayed him to find that Bible exams had been banned and that – on the street corner nearest to each city school – only copies of the violently anti-Semitic Der Stürmer were on sale, from a newsstand that had often been decorated with the words ‘The Jews are our Bad Luck.’
Sidgwick was given pause for thought again when, nearing Dachau, he found the road to the camp blatantly marked out for travellers by a stone post on which, in a circular frieze, uniformed men were depicted cheerily cudgelling Jews. Sidgwick (whose own robust view was that ‘the sooner they [the Jews] have control of the world the better’) photographed the monument and reproduced it in his book.
Admirably, Sidgwick set out to sound a warning. Having visited Dachau, he reported that the Jewish men to whom he spoke there were evidently ‘terrified. They would not speak, they would not say anything . . .’ One prisoner with a badly broken leg, when pressed by Sidgwick for an explanation, answered that he had tripped over in a grassy field. The guards’ explanation for their detention of the Jews was that they were guilty of ‘race defilement’. Quizzed, one of the guards acknowledged that at least four other such camps existed: ‘Had they kept secret a lot more? I had no idea.’2
Sidgwick, who later married a German travel writer from Düsseldorf, wrote a brave book that went against the mood of the times in Britain. His German Journey was massively outsold by young Beverley Nichols’s Cry Havoc!, a book that called for unilateral disarmament during the year in which Hitler came to power. It was the year during which – confirming the results of an armistice night debate held in 1932 – an Oxford Union audience memorably voted that England should never again go to war, neither for king, nor for country.
Sidgwick was an odd one out in a decade when it became conventional for young men and women to round off their education by spending a couple of months in Germany.
Germany’s new category of visitors often arrived straight from home or school. Many of them were only sixteen; few knew or cared anything about politics. Welcomed by a country where the word had gone out that each and every German citizen should act as an ambassador for the Reich, the cheerful schoolgirls and their Etonian counterparts were given a splendid time. Ariel Tennant, whose gentle Uncle Ernest had not forgotten Germany’s misery after the war, was among the tiny minority who caught a glimpse of what was happening and tried to speak out when they returned to England. ‘It didn’t do any good. If I tried to tell people what I’d seen, they just dismissed it. They always said the same thing: “You’re too young to understand.” They didn’t want to hear.’3
Ernest Tennant was an enthusiastic supporter and facilitator of his niece’s expressed desire, towards the end of 1933, to visit Berlin as an art student. As a bonus, he arranged for Ariel and his sister Nancy (acting as Ariel’s chaperone) to dine there with his cherished friends, the Ribbentrops. Aunt Nancy, having been welcomed to Berlin by Putzi Hanfstaengl, explained her dilemma. She did not wish to dine with the Ribbentrops, of whom she had previously formed an unfavourable impression. She did, however, wish to have a few words with Adolf Hitler. Since Nancy spoke excellent German and Ernest Tennant was already doing everything he could for the cause of Anglo-German friendship, a meeting was arranged.
‘Aunt Nancy did most of the talking. I was just looking around. The Chancellery was extraordinary. Such a place: you never saw anywhere so gloomy and enormous.’ Hitler, having complimented the senior Miss Tennant on her command of his language, announced that he himself knew just four foreign words. In France, he had discovered the meaning of ‘Vous êtes mon prisonnier’.
Possibly, the guests from England were being offered a rare example of the legendary humour for which Hitler was later so admired by those laughter-loving Mitford siblings Diana and Unity. More probably, the Führer was eager to spread the news that he had actually used those words in warfare: his prized Class One Iron Cross had been awarded for the single-handed arrest of a group of French soldiers whom he had discovered sheltering in a crater. Ariel was more interested in the expressive way that Hitler made use of his eyes; to her (as she later remembered it), the man she saw at the Chancellery seemed more like a charismatic actor than a leader to whom the German nation could safely entrust its future destiny.
Ariel’s main companion during her first weeks in Munich was her younger cousin, Derek Hill; it was with mixed feelings that she learned that Derek’s close friends, the Mitfords, were planning to pay a visit to Germany. Ariel Tennant had only met the Mitford family once, at their London home in Rutland Gate, and she was in no hurry to repeat the experience. ‘Oh! That visit! It was awful! The sisters all shouted at once and their mother looked desperate and went off into another room and played ‘Tea for Two’, but over and over again, on the piano. They weren’t at all nice to me. I remember bursting into tears and wanting to go home. But Derek adored them.’4
Taken to the station in Munich to meet her cousin’s friends as they got off the train, Ariel’s first impression was of how heavily made-up Unity and Diana looked in comparison to all the fresh-faced German girls. ‘Although Diana did look so beautiful. She was laughing and saying what bliss it was to be out of England with no nanny, no children and no husband in tow.’ (In 1934, Diana was still married to Bryan Guinness, although entirely preoccupied by Oswald Mosley.) Unity, while startlingly tall and muscular in build, seemed the less formidable of the two sisters.
Ariel Tennant’s account of the peculiar friendship that she formed with Unity in Munich is both touching and bizarre. Having already met Hitler herself, she found Unity’s obsession with the man quite baffling.
She really couldn’t believe it when Derek told her that anyone could see Hitler and his bodyguards any time, just by dropping in at the Carlton Hotel on a Sunday afternoon. He put himself on show there, for the English. Our families all liked the Carlton. Unity was having tea there with Derek when she got the famous invitation to be introduced – and that was that. She rushed across the room and she never came back. Derek was quite upset at the time. But Unity was always a bit strange.
Unity’s passion, from the point of that first encounter, became hard for her friends to handle. Strolling beside Ariel along the broad, sandy paths of Munich’s English Garden, she would seize her slight companion by the arm (‘and twist it, so it really hurt’), to make her say that she, too, was a worshipper. ‘But it was much worse when we went to Austria.’
Unaffected, as foreigners, by the £40 surcharge imposed on Germans who needed to travel to that threatened country in the period when Austria’s President Dollfuss (who would be assassinated in July) was resisting Nazification, the two English girls went off to visit a castle near Vienna.5 Here, to Ariel’s dismay, Unity announced (after they’d climbed onto the castle’s roof) that she could hear the voices of imprisoned Nazis calling to them from deep within, far down below. ‘So she lay flat down on the roof-leads and started singing the Horst Wessel Lied through a grating in the roof, but terribly loudly, and over and over. And she was so angry because I wouldn’t believe in the prisoners. Everybody had to agree with Unity. It was terribly exhausting!’
While the bizarre figure of Unity Mitford overshadows Ariel Tennant’s memories of Munich in 1934, she does offer two other striking recollections. One is of a woodland hike that she took with Derek Hill and of how they came, by chance, upon a secret army of young boys. ‘All marching, and all with rifles on their shoulders. Some can’t have been more than eleven. We felt sure that we’d stumbled on something we weren’t meant to know about. And we were right!’ Ariel also recalls the day in 1934 when she joined three young men who were making an investigative trip (one was a journalist) to Dachau. ‘But they wouldn’t let women go in. I sat in the entrance hall and waited, right under a sign saying that escapees would be shot on sight. I couldn’t hear anything. I do remember that. There was a quiet that felt wrong.’
Later, on their way back to Munich, asking her companions for their impressions, Ariel found that while one was horrified, and another – the journalist – expressed his concern, the third of her companions took the line that whatever was happening at Dachau was nothing to do with them, and best forgotten at once.
‘And that’s how it was, when I came back to England,’ Ariel reiterates, as if repetition could somehow alter the past. ‘I did try to talk about the things I’d seen. But people simply didn’t want to hear.’6
Today, at the age of ninety, my mother still possesses a clear memory of the dress she wore on her way out to Munich in August 1934. It was made of thin, cherry-coloured wool, with a white collar. ‘And I had a beautiful new coat made of grey silk tussore.’
Rosemary Scott-Ellis, aged eleven, was on her way to attend the wedding of her brother, John, who was finally marrying, after a three-year engagement, Irene, the youngest of the five Harrach sisters. The Scott-Ellis family, with the exception of John’s twin, who was nursing a baby, had all travelled out to Germany. My family still have photographs of the wedding group, gathered on the front steps of the Harrachs’ long, low house on Biedersteiner Strasse; in the images that show them gathered around a big dining table in the hall, the absence of swastikas and peaked caps is instantly noticeable. ‘Well, there was one. That man called Haupt Pappenheim who took John out driving. He turned up in a Nazi uniform. The Harrachs didn’t seem very pleased.’7
Before my mother can deflect the conversation into telling me how hard it was for a small bridesmaid to carry a huge sheaf of gladioli in her arms, I ask if she has any historical recollections. This was, after all, Munich, just one month after the killing of Ernst Röhm and the Schleichers. Trying to help, she mentions visiting a museum.
There was a tremendous din going on outside. When I looked out of a window, there were men in uniform marching everywhere. The din was the sound of their heels clacking across the cobbles. And there were big megaphones strapped to lamp-posts and the sides of buildings. They’d suddenly start up with that awful sound and everybody was supposed to stand and listen, whatever they were doing. I suppose it was Hitler giving one of his speeches.
Pressed to remember something – anything – more about a Munich that must still have been in the grip of terror after the June massacre, my mother looks confused. A massacre? There were the megaphones and the marching soldiers, but she heard no screams from cellars or shuttered rooms. She saw no bloodshed, witnessed no murders. All was in order. Nothing untoward was exposed to view. She wants to tell me, instead, about making friends with two of the little blond-haired page boys.
The Harrachs, like many of their friends, had discovered that escorting young English visitors around the city of Munich, while providing them with a home in which they could hone their language skills, was a useful way to raise funds in stringent times. In January 1934, the year of my Uncle John’s wedding, Irene Harrach’s sister ‘Cucca’ was acting as a hostess and cultural chaperone to two English girls, Rosaline James and Penelope Mills. Just down the road, Dorothy Gage was settling into a large, airy flat filled with Biedermeier furniture and owned by the Harrachs’ artistic friend and neighbour in the Schwabing district of Munich, Anna Montgelas.8
A sociable young creature, Dorothy’s diary for 1934 presents a teeming thicket of appointments to be kept with her new chums from England: two Yarde-Buller sisters; Ursula Strutt; Daphne Quilter, Henry Wyndham; David Russell* and – staying at the Montgelas flat – David’s tweedily conventional but extremely beautiful younger sister, Barbara.
Dorothy was the kind of young ambassador that could only have been dreamed about by Hitler. She enjoyed everything in Germany and thought everybody there was wonderful. She went dancing at the Apache nightclub; she went skiing in the Alps; she even attended a tea at the Carlton that had been arranged by the staunchly pro-Nazi Countess Montgelas. (‘We saw Hitler,’ reported an excited Dorothy. ‘Hurrah!’)8 Dorothy also – again thanks to the good connections of a hostess who made her girls curtsey to Hitler’s portrait – attended one of the Führer’s speeches (‘Excellent seats’). Between studying German and watching several impressive ceremonies of Nazi oath-taking, Dorothy managed to work in the Ring Cycle (‘too lovely’) and Strauss’s sophisticated domestic comedy Intermezzo (‘very boring’).
Away from the home indoctrination being practised by Anna Montgelas, Dorothy enjoyed vigorous sessions of ‘ragging’ with David Russell and Henry Wyndham (‘Absolute gentlemen . . . one can always trust them’). Sometimes, Cucca Harrach, who liked Anna better than her politics, sent her own young English charges along to join Dorothy for supper and the cinema. Watching the unblushingly propagandist film Hans Westmar (based upon the life of Horst Wessel, it opened with the emblem of a gigantic torch-flanked swastika), Dorothy got the point. The film about ‘Hans Wessell [sic]’ had been ‘excellent’.
Dorothy Gage’s diary is a guileless private document, a record of unblemished good cheer. ‘This is a lovely way of living,’ she wrote during her time in Munich, and, more joyfully still, during her skiing visit to Anna’s second home in the Bavarian Alps: ‘Perfectly glorious day and marvellous time. Oh what a good time I’m having.’
Living in Munich in 1934, a young English girl could remain untouched by trauma, unscathed by the evidence that anything might be amiss in this disciplined and glittering world. Elsewhere, the youthful visitors from England sensed that, while every endeavour was being made to offer them a pleasant experience, life in Nazi Germany was perhaps a little less straightforward than it initially appeared.
April Austen-Hall was the granddaughter of Edward Ritter, theGerman director of Deutsche Bank’s London branch during the First War. ‘The English locked him out when the War started, because he was a German, and then, when he went to Holland to try to salvage some of his clients’ funds, the Dutch locked him in as an intern and left my poor English grandmother stranded on her own in London. She was the one who brought me up. My mother died when I was only nine.’9
In 1933, when April was sixteen years old, her widowed father married again. His new wife was a Bavarian aristocrat whose family ran their castle-home, Marquartstein, as a private school.* ‘My stepmother thought I was under-educated, so I was sent out to Marquartstein. You wouldn’t believe how cold it was! The windows were always open and we had to run around the walls before breakfast every morning, even in the snow. The ink used to freeze up like a black worm inside my fountain pen.’
April (‘Prilly’) owns a Marquartstein album, filled with pictures of her former schoolfriends. Some wear the uniform of the Hitler Youth; Prilly herself wore the armband for the Bund Deutscher Mädel. It was, she says defensively, like being a Girl Guide. ‘It made me feel that I could help people.’
Asked about signs of unrest, Prilly Crowther (née Austen-Hall) mentions the sound of shooting in the mountains at night, and the sudden disappearance of a cobbler from the local village. All newspapers were stopped during June 1934. No word reached the school about the massacre in Munich until Prilly’s anxious father telephoned from London. He had read Hugh Greene’s report of the killings in the Daily Telegraph and was understandably apprehensive about the safety of his daughter.
The names of two of Prilly’s schoolmates suggest that they could have been Jewish. They were. The headmaster, officially a Nazi, made a point of taking the two girls with him to Stockholm when they had to sit their exams. Both got high marks. In Germany, Prilly explains, that kind of marking would not have been possible for Jewish schoolgirls.
Asked what she thought about the Nazi regime under which she once received part of her education, Prilly is ambivalent. Grim stories were told by Ernst, one of her favourite schoolmates at Marquartstein, about the bleak years when his mother sent her small children out scavenging for discarded cabbage stalks under the market stalls. Some families seemed to think that Hitler was doing good for Germany. Ernst’s mother did.
Asked if she kept up with Ernst and his friends after the war, April Crowther answers that they were all killed on the Russian front and that, because of the attitude of her own husband, an army doctor (‘he was away in the war for four whole years, which was quite hard on us both’), all remaining contact with her German friends had to be severed. The friendships were lost. Only the album, showing page after page of laughing sixteen-year-olds, preserves them.
Photograph albums, letters and diaries offer a more honest picture of how the young visitors from England reacted to Germany at the time than the recollections they dutifully summon up in old age. Visiting friends in Rothberg during the summer of 1934, two stalwart country girls (photographs show them posing in baggy knickerbockers amid a waving sea of swastika-emblazoned pennants) wrote home to their family about the good that Hitler was doing for his German people. Whether saluting a parade of 20,000 flags at Nuremberg (‘I can tell you my arm ached!’) or admiring the handsome cavalry officer who arrived to tell the people of Rothberg to cast their ‘free’ vote for Hitler as president, Betsy and Dorothy Innes-Smith were enthralled. Bayreuth was disappointing, but Hitler never let a young fan from England down.
‘There appear to be two Gods in Germany,’ Dorothy wrote after her return to England. ‘One is Hitler and the other is Work . . . Germany has been very low and Hitler has been raised up and is preaching a New Germany: “Deutschland Erwacht” [Germany awakes] is on all their standards and this spirit is in almost every man, woman, and child.’10
Harold Atcherley was eighteen in 1935, the year he went out from England to stay with a family of Jewish academics, the Demuths, while he studied at Heidelberg. Jews were already being viciously targeted: the marriage of the Demuths’ daughter to an Aryan had cost the university-educated young spouse his job and reduced him to stuffing sausage skins in a factory.11
Back for the following year of his studies, Atcherley discovered that the Demuths’ pretty house had been boarded up. The whole family had disappeared; nobody could tell him what had happened. At the university, a new course was being taught: ‘Die Judenfrage’ (the Jewish Question). Attendance was required; heckling was strictly forbidden.
Atcherley describes the week in which the venerable university celebrated its 550th anniversary with glossy parades and various political grandees arriving to deliver speeches from a swastika-draped grandstand. One of Atcherley’s friends, Bob Montgomery, decided to put on a show of British patriotism by hanging a Union Jack out of a window, floating high above a sea of Nazi pennants. ‘Right opposite the grandstand! They couldn’t have missed it, but nobody complained.’ As Atcherley points out, a young student from England could be as bold as brass in his defiance and get away with it scot-free. No such freedom existed any longer for the youth of Germany. ‘It was dreadfully unjust.’
In 1936, while Atcherley continued his studies at Heidelberg, sixteen-year-old Daphne Brock was living in Dresden with a discreetly anti-Nazi family called de Haucq. Each morning, Daphne studied German literature at the home of a Jewish professor (‘small, frail, wonderfully dressed’) until one day, when he disappeared. Another teacher was found. Weeks later, an unsigned postcard from Switzerland discreetly allowed Daphne to know that her former tutor was safe.
Hitler was never mentioned in the de Haucqs’ house. Daphne’s knowledge of him was expanded when she allowed a handsome young admirer called Guscha von Wedel to take her along to one of the Nuremberg rallies. ‘Guscha said it would be good for me to understand the effect that Hitler had. The crowds were enormous and Hitler was high up on a podium, shrieking gibberish.’12 Daphne points out that her own German was already fluent, ‘But I couldn’t make out a word that Hitler said. The people around us all had their arms up and they were screaming and screaming. Guscha just watched me. I wondered, afterwards, what he thought of it all. He wouldn’t say. It wasn’t safe to say what you thought, not then.’
Later, shortly before the war, Guscha von Wedel visited Daphne’s family in England. ‘My parents liked Guscha a lot. He was highly intelligent, and very worried. He and my father spent a lot of time talking about Europe together. The Swiss Red Cross sent me a message after he was killed at Stalingrad. Poor Guscha.’
Persecution of the Jews had become more overt by the time that seventeen-year-old Elizabeth Lowry-Corry, a pretty girl with brown hair and light blue eyes, went out to study music at Dresden in 1938. Her hosts, the Riphahns, occupied a small flat near the Frauenkirche; in 1938, they were making plans to leave Germany. ‘Having me to stay brought in a little extra money. They weren’t at all well off. Frau Riphahn did all the cooking and cleaning herself.’13
Walking around Dresden, Elizabeth often saw and spoke to Jews with the yellow stars sewn on their clothes. ‘I was English, so I could do as I liked. The Dresden people had to keep away from them. Somebody was always watching.’
Twice every week, Elizabeth would go on her own to attend the great Semper opera house, where Herr Riphahn (‘a charmingman in his forties with a little beard and such a kind laugh’) was a member of the orchestra in which the first cellist was remarkable for the expressiveness of his playing. The Riphahns told her that the cellist had been ordered to divorce his Jewish wife or to stop playing in public. The cellist chose the orchestra. ‘But then he fell in love with another Jewish girl, so he lost his contract anyway. The Riphahns had a lot of Jewish friends. It was so hard for them not to be able to do anything to help. At night, I’d hear Frau Riphahn crying and crying in her room.’
Elizabeth still owns the exquisite dancing figures and the lovely butterfly vase that Frau Riphahn encouraged her to buy during a visit to Meissen. ‘Mostly, the factory was churning out busts of Hitler, but they still made the beautiful old things on the side.’
When Elizabeth left Dresden, the Riphahns were saving hard for their escape. They never succeeded. The whole family, the parents and their four children, died in the firestorm of bombs dropped by Britain. For herself, Elizabeth Lowry-Corry has no wish to return to the carefully restored post-war city. ‘I loved my days in Dresden far too much,’ she says. ‘It was the happiest time I ever knew.’
Such an enduring and deep love for Dresden does not suggest that Elizabeth brought back hostile reports of her stay in Germany. Few did, even in 1938. Young Ronald Barker, transferred from his first Bavarian lodging to stay more happily with a headmaster, Herr Mayr, who disliked Jews and approved of Hitler, was more struck by the fact that the Mayr family took their baths in a tub in the cellar than by the regular visits to their home from two young nephews of Hermann Goering. Invited to produce drawings of Hitler for a local club, Barker readily complied with the request.
It’s difficult to piece together what made Ronald Barker’s initial experience in Germany so unhappy, but a story of going out alone – from his lodging – on a lake, heavily muffled in a coat, and then capsizing, has something about it that discourages further interrogation. He speaks with much more readiness about the Mayr household, although not enough – for an inquisitive author’s taste – about the visits of Goering’s nephews.* Instead, Barker talks about the evenings when ‘we boys’ used to drive up into the mountains in an old T Ford and Herr Mayr’s Mercedes. ‘They showed me how to do mating calls to the stags on conch shells. After a bit, you’d hear the females roaring back. And, sometimes, we played a game with model soldiers, planting them out like an army on the mountainside in the snow.’ It was, Barker says, a wonderful time in his life. ‘I still go back whenever I can,’ he declares. ‘I loved Bavaria.’14
Young men and women like Prilly Crowther, Ariel Tennant and Ronald Barker came to Germany with an agenda that did not stretch far beyond having a good time. Robert Byron, a pug-faced young travel writer who had already established a brilliant reputation with The Road to Oxiana, came to Germany with a broken heart (the love of his life had died the previous year of Hodgkin’s disease) and a stern desire ‘to see the enemy for myself’.15
Opposed to dictatorships ever since he was sent down from Oxford and began a life of adventurous travel, Robert Byron had been disgusted by the tameness of England’s response both to Hitler’s invasion of the Rhineland and to the Austrian Anschluss. Arriving in Germany in early September 1938, Byron began his investigations by attending (on a pass that had been intended for his friend Tom Mitford) a Nuremberg rally, in the company of Unity and her parents. The enthusiasm of the Mitfords was heart-felt; to Byron, the occasion was redolent with evil.
Byron was still at Nuremberg when, writing in The Times of 7 September, the paper’s deputy editor, Robert Barrington-Ward, published a leader article that warned Czechoslovakia not to oppose Hitler’s planned invasion of the neighbouring Sudetenland. The Czechs were told – in the curt paraphrase Byron made in his diary the following day – to give up ‘before it is too late’.16
It was articles of this appeasing nature that confirmed the impression in Germany that England would let her do as she pleased in Europe. At Nuremberg, the article was read aloud and praised. Speaking at an occasion where several journalists, including Byron, were present, Dr Karl Silex, the influential editor of the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, cited the Times piece as evidence that Britain had adopted a sensible policy of non-intervention. For Byron, Silex had gone too far. ‘I saw a red flush rising on Robert’s neck,’ wrote his fellow guest Virginia Cowles, an American journalist working for the Sunday Times.
The next moment I heard him saying in a deadly voice: ‘What happens on the continent is always England’s concern. Every now and then we are unfortunate enough to be led by a Chamberlain – but that’s only temporary. Don’t be misguided. In the end we always rise up and oppose the tyrannies that threaten Europe. We have smashed them before, and I warn you we will smash them again.’17
Byron’s defiance, while worthy of his namesake’s reputation as a champion of liberty, was ineffectual. Three weeks later, Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich Agreement, approving Germany’s invasion of the Sudetenland and obtaining, in return, the precious pledge by which Hitler solemnly agreed that their two nations had not the slightest reason ever to wish to go to war against each other again.
Peace pledges did not impress Byron. The dishonesty of the arrangements jarred with the sense of belonging to an England that had decided to celebrate Munich as the greatest achievement of Chamberlain’s career.* On the day projected for Germany’s taking of the Sudetenland, a heated Byron rounded on a dinner party of friends and silenced their chatter with the demand: ‘Are you proud to be English tonight?’18
Three months later, Byron returned to Germany, staying at the light-filled new Berlin home of his sister, Lucy Butler, whose husband was working as a foreign correspondent for The Times. A month after the November horrors of Kristallnacht, Byron went to an exhibition at the Reichstag. It was called ‘The Wandering Jew’.
Already staged in Munich and on its way to Vienna, the exhibition was mandatory viewing for Berlin school children. Over the door, a gigantic poster showed a heavily built and straggling-bearded Orthodox Jew with one hand extended to beg and the other clenched into a fist that brandished a whip. Inside, in over twenty rooms, the walls offered crookedly hung images (accompanied by derisive descriptions) of such illustrious figures as Heinrich Heine, Felix Mendelssohn, Albert Einstein and the murdered Walter Rathenau.
The show sickened Byron. In Soviet Russia, he had been horrified by museums that were devoted to the mockery of religion, but this, as he pointed out to his sympathetic sister, was far worse: ‘an anti-Jew exhibition is an attack on humanity itself . . . Has any people ever sunk so low?’19
Resistance was the only answer, in Byron’s view. Back in London, however, he found himself dismissed as a warmonger and a troublemaker: a man out of tune with his peace-loving times.
Byron had signed up as a war correspondent when the boat on which he was travelling towards Alexandria was torpedoed on 24 February 1941. Robert Byron, when he drowned, was two days short of thirty-six, the age at which his famous namesake died at Missolonghi.
Footnotes
* David Russell, moving in a slightly older and more sophisticated group, later made his name as one of the audacious unit who broke into Tobruk by impersonating German guards.
* The school was founded by Hermann Harless, who had worked with A. S. Neill at Hellerau, at a precursor of Neill’s English school, Summerhill.
* Goering’s nephews did not necessarily share their uncle’s political beliefs. The Goerings, like the Schulenburgs, were a politically divided family.
* The Guardian, however, followed the New York Times in criticising the pact and expressing considerable cynicism about Hitler’s latest pledge of peace.