Elizabeth Fry, visiting Germany on a mission of prison reform in the 1840s, had included in her tour several of the places at which groups of Quaker Friends were eager to greet their English ally. The strong and long-established presence of Quaker families and communities in both England and Germany provided a solid foundation upon which political resisters to the Nazis were able to build during the thirties.
The long-standing and treasured Protestant connection between the two countries – reaching back over three centuries to the year when a Stuart princess from England married the young Protestant Elector Palatine – provided another area in which political and religious opposition could – and did – flourish.*
In December 1932, on the eve of Hitler’s chancellorship, Gareth Jones had told an English radio audience a dark joke that was already doing the rounds in Germany about how, when Jewish converts were ordered to leave the churches of Germany, Christ would be the first to step down from his place above the altar. The Nazi threat to the status quo of the Church was already apparent; all the Nazis lacked in 1932 was the authority that would soon enable them to outlaw any form of Christian worship that did not acknowledge the absolute authority of the state, while rejecting Christ’s Jewish origins. Houston Stewart Chamberlain had proposed this route to a receptive emperor; Hitler would enshrine it in law.
It was against this background of a threatened faith that a friendship developed between two remarkable men: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a young Lutheran pastor in Germany, and George Bell in England, the cultured and quietly outspoken Bishop of Chichester.
Bonhoeffer, the precociously intelligent son of an eminent Berlin psychiatrist, was still a schoolboy when, having announced his intention of reforming the Church, he set aside his piano studies (his aristocratic grandmother, Klara von Hase, had been taught by Liszt and Clara Schumann) to concentrate on theology. In 1930, having achieved brilliant results, and impeccably equipped for ordination in every qualification bar his extreme youth, Bonhoeffer went off for a year to study at a seminary in New York. Here, having made friends with a black seminarian (Frank Fisher), acquired an enduring enthusiasm for African spirituals and taught Sunday school at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, he embarked on a tour of America and Mexico, while giving talks along the way on the value of a peaceful world. The prospect of staying in America did not tempt him; instead, Bonhoeffer returned home to embark on a more conventional life as a Lutheran pastor.
Sweet-natured, and deceptively boyish in appearance until the end of his short life, Bonhoeffer was uncompromising in his belief in religious freedom. The rise of National Socialism – a party to which his entire family were adamantly opposed – shocked him especially, because of its unconcealed hostility to all other forms of belief. On the eve of Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, the young priest actually managed to obtain a personal interview with the octogenarian President Hindenburg.
Without success, he implored the bewildered but always courteous old gentleman to reconsider his decision to bestow the chancellorship of Germany on such a faithless demagogue as Adolf Hitler. Two days later, Bonhoeffer went on air to broadcast a warning of the terrible danger in which a comatose nation had placed itself: did the good people of Germany not understand that they were delivering themselves into the hands of a man who ‘makes an idol of himself above God’?1
The speech was cut off, brusquely censored by the authorities before further offence could be caused to Germany’s new leader. Bonhoeffer had been warned not to make trouble; it was advice that he would never be prepared to heed. In July 1933, Bonhoeffer protested against the rigged Church elections by which religious control was placed in the hands of the Nazi-supporting German Christians; in September, he spoke out again, to query the legislation that now permitted only Aryan-born priests to conduct services (for Aryan-born citizens) in the new Germany. This new Nazi decree, in a country where conversion to Lutheranism had been a widespread practice among Jews for over a hundred years, caused disruption in the Church, and widespread dismay in the country.
By the autumn of 1933, London’s modest number of German pastors were overwhelmed by the task of dealing with a sudden influx of immigrants, both Christians and Jews, many of whom were little better equipped to deal with a new life than the stream of German exiles who had fled to England during the repressive aftermath of the 1848 uprisings. Utterly disheartened by what was happening to Germany, the 26-year-old Bonhoeffer decided that he could serve a better purpose in England. Established in London, he could comfort the German refugees of every faith: ‘Only he who cries out for Jews has the right to sing Gregorian chants’ was the way that Bonhoeffer would famously express his sympathy for people of all religions. But the young pastor also came to England to rally support against a regime that he believed it was his duty to oppose, both as a Christian and a patriot.
Bonhoeffer spent eighteen months in London. Officially, he was in charge of two German communities at Whitechapel and Sydenham; unofficially, he also helped out the hard-pressed pastor Julius Rieger at the splendid old Hanoverian church of St George’s, Aldgate (where two great German boards of commandments still hang against the walls), in the heart of the area that was then still known as Little Germany. Bonhoeffer got on well with Rieger, but a more powerful ally, and an enduring friend, emerged in the agreeable form of George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester – a man whom many at that time assumed would one day become Archbishop of Canterbury.
In 1933, George Bell was fifty years old. The poetry-loving and artistic son of a Hampshire vicar, Bell had used his four years as Dean of Canterbury to give that city its first literary festival, one which offered a bold platform for new works of drama. As Bishop of Chichester, from 1929 on, Bell had maintained his close connection with the festival. Murder in the Cathedral, commissioned by the Bishop from T. S. Eliot and put on in Canterbury Cathedral in 1935, showed Britain – and the world – how a priest, Thomas à Becket, might be assassinated for daring to challenge the authority of the state. Such ritualised theatre, delivering its message through Eliot’s veiled but powerful language, was one of the many routes through which Bell sought to wake England up to the truth about Nazi Germany.
Bell and Bonhoeffer met at a time when both men were searching for support in their crusade against a Nazified faith. Bell, too, had opposed the infamous ‘Aryan paragraph’ by which Germany’s pastors were to be appointed on the strength not of their convictions, but of their racial history. Supplied with direct information about Germany by his new friend, the Bishop began addressing himself to the wider public through the only portion of The Times that could still occasionally avoid censorship: its letters column.
The friendship between Bell and Bonhoeffer, as both men swiftly recognised, came close to that of father and son. Bonhoeffer addressed the good-humoured and half-Irish Bishop as his ‘Uncle George’; Bell, in turn, did his avuncular best to prevent Bonhoeffer from wearing himself out in an excess of zeal. (Might a hardworking young pastor be tempted to break away from duties in the East End for long enough to take breakfast at the Athenaeum, Bell teased his friend in February 1934 – or might such indulgence put his soul at risk: ‘is that too dangerous?’2)
Breakfasts at the Athenaeum were doubtless spent in discussing weightier matters than the excellence of marmalade on toast. Bonhoeffer was involved, from late in 1933, in discussions with Martin Niemöller, a fellow pastor, about setting up a form of resisters’ faith, the Confessing Church, an underground organisation which would allow believers to avoid the repugnant order to hail Hitler – rather than Christ – as their supreme leader. Bell was all for it. On 1 June 1934, Bell signed his name to the Barmen Declaration, and thus to the formal birth of the Confessing Church.
Later in that same month of June, Bell once again proclaimed the need for support from England against the active force for evil that had taken hold of modern Germany. But England, in 1934, was not in the mood to consider such challenging questions. Bell’s fellow churchman Dick Sheppard, the newly appointed Canon of St Paul’s, attracted more interest that autumn with an appeal for the renunciation of warfare. The 30,000 male responses (women, as assumed pacifists, were asked not to reply) led to the founding, the following year, of Sheppard’s well-intended Peace Pledge Union.
Back in Germany by April 1935, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was identified as an enemy of the state. The young pastor’s unnameable crime was to have endorsed, in the form of the Confessing Church, an alternative to the worship of Hitler and the obliging ‘Providence’ that blessed an Aryanised country. Officially, at a time when virtually every spire in Germany was crowned by a swastika, Bonhoeffer’s sin was to have failed to seek permission to take a group of young seminarists to liberal Sweden, where Lutheranism flourished with no state links (and with crosses firmly affixed to its church spires). A marked man from this point, Bonhoeffer’s name attracted attention again the following year, when certain of his Confessing Church colleagues invited Hitler to respond to a list of queries about the current status of Christianity in Nazi Germany. Receiving no answer, and advised by a Jewish lawyer to act with courage, they leaked their loaded questions to the foreign press.
Their address to Hitler appeared in the newspapers in June 1936. Bishop Bell indicated his support for the protesters by circulating a very pointed prayer (‘for all who suffer shame, on account of their race’), while despatching a valiant sister-in-law, Laura Livingstone, to help Bonhoeffer with his work among persecuted Jews and Christians in Berlin.
In the short term, the group of rebel clerics remained untouched, but only because their timing was singularly inconvenient. In June 1936, Germany was just two months away from hosting the Olympic Games in Berlin. Prodigious sums had been spent to ensure that the visitors would see a proud, successful Germany with which, in Neville Chamberlain’s eloquent phrase, they could do business.
Writing with hindsight about the Games, it was easy for a spectator like Beverley Nichols to recall the scorn he had felt as ‘the pudding-faced aristocracy of England’ were chauffeured through the placard-free streets of Berlin, ‘murmuring to each other that really the Hitler Jugend were rather wonderful’.* 3 At the time, the glamour of the massed parades and the affable prodigality of the Reich’s grandees, when allied to the conspicuous absence of any signs of brutal oppression, proved marvellously effective. The world visited, allowed itself to be entertained and went away impressed. Shortly after its departure, the Jewish lawyer who had advised on the leaked memorandum was arrested and murdered; his colleagues were despatched to prison camps. Bonhoeffer, while disappearing from public view, continued to prepare young seminarians for work in the Confessing Church.
In 1937, conditions in Germany grew harsher for the dauntless members of the Confessing Church. In July, Martin Niemöller, one of its founder members, was arrested. Spared death, following a series of impassioned public letters from George Bell, Niemöller was imprisoned until the end of the war. A few weeks later, a flawed attempt was made to arrest Niemöller’s successor, Franz Hildebrandt, while he was giving a sermon. Heckled and surrounded by the furious congregation after the breakdown of their getaway car, the kidnappers slunk away empty-handed. Hildebrandt left the country, surfacing only after he had joined forces with Julius Rieger in London.
The thwarted abduction of a priest from his church provided a rare moment of black comedy in a tragic year of religious repression; by the end of November 1937, more than 700 Lutheran pastors had been arrested and the secluded haven in which Bonhoeffer had been keeping hope alive was under threat.
From 1935 onwards, Bonhoeffer had been established at a seminary in Pomerania, far away from the centre of Nazi activity. Here, his patron and friend was an elderly widow, Countess Ruth von Kleist-Retzow, a woman of independent wealth who shared Bonhoeffer’s passionate opposition to the Nazis.
Photographs of the Kleist estate at which Ruth spent part of her time, while also inhabiting a handsome town house in nearby Stettin, hint at a life of civility, culture and tolerance. One image shows Bonhoeffer and Ruth sitting out on a roughly cropped lawn: the smiling young man leans back in his chair beside a sturdy, white-haired, plainly dressed old lady whose face is alive with humorous intelligence. Probably, it was taken at around the time that Bonhoeffer had begun to take a romantic interest in one of the twenty grandchildren who were under Ruth Kleist’s care. (In 1942, Maria von Wedemeyer and Dietrich became engaged.)
Accounts of life on the Kleist estate are scanty, but beguiling. Services at the seminary would usually be followed by games of garden ping-pong for the younger grandchildren, while Bonhoeffer, sitting in the shade of the massive chestnut trees for which the estate was famed, talked about religion and literature with the wise and profoundly religious old lady whom Dietrich, like her family, only ever addressed as ‘Grandmother’. Later, after a frugal lunch with the novices and visiting pastors had been consumed around the seminary’s horseshoe table, the entire cheerful group joined in reading or acting out a Shakespeare play. The comedies were especially loved. As You Like It, so ideally suited by theme and setting to such an environment, must have been a favourite.
Towards the end of 1937, the Gestapo closed down this gentle refuge for the Confessing Church. The following year, Hans Dohnanyi, Dietrich’s brother-in-law, persuaded Bonhoeffer to join the secret German resistance (Widerstand) group that had formed in Germany’s chief official intelligence organisation, the Abwehr, under the quietly subversive leadership of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris.
From 1939 on, with the exception of a last attempt to rally support in America for the German resistance (Bonhoeffer, rejecting the offer of a professorship, returned home on the eve of war), the young German worked covertly, out of the reach of suspicious eyes. He did not, however, abandon his contact with George Bell, with whom he riskily managed to meet up in Sweden in 1942 to discuss a plot – one of the many – for Hitler’s assassination.
Arrested in 1943 and imprisoned, Bonhoeffer was subsequently sentenced to death for his connection to the 20 July plot and following the discovery of diaries that had been kept by his fellow prisoner Wilhelm Canaris. (The diaries shed an ungratifying light upon the ways of the Third Reich as viewed by a former intelligence chief.)
Implicated by association, Bonhoeffer was hanged at Flossenbürg on the same April morning as a pathetically frail Canaris: 9 April 1945, two weeks before Americans liberated the camp’s final survivors. Stripped of his clothes before he mounted a primitive scaffold within a private cell, Bonhoeffer’s serene farewell was recorded by the unhappy prison chaplain of one of Germany’s most vicious camps: ‘This is the end – for me the beginning of life.’
George Bell, meanwhile, continued to plead for compassion to an England that, in belligerent and desperate times, had no time for the Bishop. Dismissed by Anthony Eden (making a witty allusion to Thomas à Becket) as ‘this pestilent priest’, Bell made his boldest appeal on 9 February 1944. Addressing a profoundly sceptical House of Lords, he begged that the bombing campaigns being launched against Germany should try to spare both cultural institutions and civilian lives. His words won them no reprieve.
Bell died, still under a cloud, in 1958. Fifty years later, he was honoured by Bishop Huber in Berlin as ‘an ecumenist, bridge-builder and reconciler’: in England, during that same year, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, praised the former Bishop of Chichester as a man of valour, the prophetic founder of Anglo-German reconciliation.4
The Nazi leaders, with the exception of the English cleric’s tiresome concern for the welfare of Martin Niemöller, took little interest in the endeavours of Bishop Bell. Searching for support in England, they turned instead to the press barons (Lord Rothermere proved especially obliging in this respect) and to the aristocracy in whose control Hitler continued to misplace his faith.
But how were the elusive nobility of England to be won? Putzi Hanfstaengl, a resourceful ex-officio ambassador into such circles, had fallen out of favour with Hitler by the mid-thirties. (Denounced by Unity Mitford to Hitler for making what she considered treasonable remarks, Hanfstaengl had wisely fled the country after being subjected to the – supposedly playful – threat of being parachute-dropped into Spain behind the loyalist lines.) Ribbentrop, despatched as German Ambassador to England in the autumn of 1936, was urged to carry on the good work.
One of Ribbentrop’s more intelligent ideas was to encourage high-ranking Nazis (the Duke of Brunswick and the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha were preferred for their English connections) to allow themselves to be entertained, as honoured guests, by some of the elaborate cluster of Anglo-German societies that had sprung up in Britain after the First War.
The Anglo-German Brotherhood; the Anglo-German Fellowship; the Anglo-German Circle; the Link. All of these fraternal groups – and there were a shoal of others – shared a sturdy core of aristocrats. Ribbentrop’s personal favourite, the Anglo-German Fellowship, had begun life as the Anglo-German Association, an exclusive dining club for 900 of England’s elite. Founded in 1929 for the noble purpose of furthering international understanding, the association had significantly lost its first chairman, the Jewish lawyer and peer Rufus Daniel Isaacs, 1st Marquess of Reading, in 1933, the year of Hitler’s ascent. Reborn as a fellowship in 1935, it was managed by Philip Conwell-Evans, an academic who later became involved with the German resistance, and Ernest Tennant, still grieving for the devastated Germany he had visited after the war.
One thing had not changed since Lord Reading’s pointed resignation in 1933: the reconstituted AGF remained sufficiently anti-Semitic for a second disgusted chairman, Lord Mount Temple, married to the Jewish daughter of Sir Ernest Cassel, to resign from his position in 1938.
The AGF would serve Ribbentrop’s interests well during his brief appointment as an ambassador. Happily for him, an aristocrat with political connections had already stepped forward to serve the interests of the Reich. During the months when Ribbentrop was visiting England as an ambassador-in-waiting, Lord Londonderry stood ready to welcome him into that elusive world of the English nobility to which Hitler looked for authoritative support.
‘I like to lead and control,’ the Marquess of Londonderry wrote to his wife, Edith, on 30 March 1936.5
That bold assertion came after a first, triumphant expedition to Germany. It was a happy moment in the career of a man who had been unjustly dismissed from office the previous summer for supporting the building of bomber planes (at a moment when England was toying with disarmament) and – which seemed to reflect an entirely contradictory attitude – for failing to alert the British government to statistics that the luckless Minister for Air did not possess, relating to Germany’s latest boasts about her massively increased air power.
The Londonderrys’ links to Germany were still, in 1935, fairly slight. In 1934, however, Edith and Charlie’s daughter, Maureen Stanley, had paid a visit to Berlin during which she proudly told Hermann Goering (a veteran pilot with a hero’s record) that her father was head of the Air Ministry. News of Londonderry’s subsequent demotion may have added to his attraction for the Nazis: a fallen minister in need of a morale boost could be worth cultivating.
In the closing months of a dispiriting year, Londonderry’s own sudden interest in becoming a self-appointed ambassador to the Reich was fuelled by a lethal mixture of hubris and disappointment. He had always wanted (as he confessed in later, wiser days to his close friend, Lady Desborough) to ‘dabble’ in diplomacy. When news came that Goering was ready to provide a private plane to whisk Londonderry, Edith and Mairi, their youngest daughter, over to Bavaria for the Winter Olympics, and to arrange a follow-up programme of political meetings, the Marquess accepted with alacrity.
The visit went well. Travelling on from jollities at Garmisch-Partenkirchen (the Londonderrys had no idea that the hapless inhabitants of these two small rivalrous villages had just been ordered either to become a single unit for the convenience of the Games, or to face mass imprisonment), the visitors were conducted to Berlin. Hitler, holding a dinner in their honour, granted Londonderry the rare privilege of an extensive two-hour interview. The host performed his role with the same skill that he had displayed when entertaining Lord Lothian the previous year: Otto Schmidt, the Führer’s sharp-eyed interpreter, was fascinated by the ease with which his master could don a tailcoat and play the role of a charming host, ‘moving about amongst his guests as easily as if he had grown up in the atmosphere of a great house’.6 But Schmidt, while conscious of Hitler’s greater political skills, was also rather taken by the visitor, a tall, spare, ruddy-cheeked Englishman who reminded the interpreter of the likeable King Haakon of Norway as he awkwardly searched for the right words: ‘one knew at once that this man sincerely desired an understanding with Germany’.7
Londonderry was both sincere and reassured. ‘I feel we have never spent so full, interesting and delightful a time,’ he told the British Ambassador, Eric Phipps.8 Offering no criticism of Hitler’s controversial march into the Rhineland that March, Londonderry listened to a suggestion from Ribbentrop that he might help to further good relations between their two countries by joining the elite company of the Anglo-German Fellowship in London. Already friendly with one of the original founders, Margrethe Gartner, Londonderry was happy to comply; he doubtless felt no qualms about reporting to Berlin on any interesting discussions that took place. It was pleasant, once again, to be of use.
In May, the Marquess went a step further.
Nothing has tainted Londonderry’s name more than his decision to hold a three-day house party in May 1936 at Mount Stewart, his splendid Irish home, in honour of Germany’s incoming ambassador. The event, from Ribbentrop’s own point of view, fell rather flat. He had expected to meet Britain’s influential nobility. Instead, he found himself keeping company with Prince Viktor zu Wied, an enthusiastic Nazi who had met the Londonderrys on their recent visit to Germany, and the red-wigged, wealthy and violently pro-Nazi Laura Corrigan, an American socialite so foolishly snobbish that she had once (so it was cattily whispered) shed bitter tears at having missed an introduction to the Dardanelles.9
Secrecy formed no part of Londonderry’s plan for the visit. RAF planes ostentatiously circled the estate and the unctuous George Ward Price was invited to stay and chronicle the occasion for the Daily Mail. Uninvited members of the local press took revenge by reporting, meanwhile, upon the descent of Ribbentrop’s own swastika-embellished plane, and the raising (although the family later denied this) of the German flag over an Irish roof. Jokes about ‘the Londonderry Herr’ were swiftly circulated.
Further entertainment was provided for the gossips and the press when Ribbentrop, visiting Wynyard Park (the Londonderrys’ equally enormous second home in the north of England) in the autumn of 1936, had to be restrained from trying to perform a Nazi salute during the church service at which Edith and Charlie were being anointed as joint mayors of Durham. Londonderry, according to the recollections of his daughter, Lady Mairi, was mortified.10
Perceived by the Nazis in 1936 as a man with the influence to bring a willing England to Germany’s heel, the happy Marquess was courted and flattered. There were visits to Karinhall, Goering’s splendid sporting estate, and only an occasional slap in the face for Edith, the more outspoken of the two. (‘Germany cannot forever go on making offers to England,’ Goering snapped when Edith dared criticise his colleagues, before hinting that more obliging allies might be found elsewhere.11) There were discussions with Hitler, during one of which, in October 1936, the German leader actually told Londonderry about his plans to invade Poland and Czechoslovakia. Word, plainly, was intended to seep back to England; on 24 December, Londonderry dutifully conveyed the startling news to Lord Halifax. (Two years later, a sadder and more enlightened Londonderry published that report as ‘A Letter to a Friend’ in Ourselves and Germany, wishing to demonstrate his own good faith.12)
Possibly, Hitler had expected a warm response from the English government to his proposals; possibly, the Reich’s leaders had become aware that, in this particular case, courting the aristocracy had led them to a dead end. Londonderry had a title, great wealth and many fine connections, but he was not, by 1936, a man of influence.
In 1937, it all unravelled. Londonderry’s suggestion that Goering might stay at Londonderry House for the coronation of King George VI (leaked news of the invitation caused 3000 British protesters to express their outrage) was declined. Visiting Goering’s estate once again that autumn, Londonderry found his host absent and his accommodation relocated. Shunted off to a hunting lodge near the Baltic – but still promised a splendid bison for his target – the Marquess was fobbed off with an old, enfeebled and hastily imported beast that died from the rigours of its train journey before Londonderry ever got near it. A stag was substituted, but the message was plain: the peer had lost his value to Germany. More sadly, he had lost his reputation back at home.
Lord Londonderry died, in 1949, a broken man. Too late, the Marquess had recanted his views and poignantly acknowledged the folly of his endeavours. The fact that he bothered to preserve and even display Ribbentrop’s trashy house gift of a mass-produced white Meissen stormtrooper – it is still on show at Mount Stewart today – has been identified as proof of Londonderry’s continuing enthusiasm for a regime that, by 1938, he had come to detest. It seems more likely that Ribbentrop’s gift was his chosen scourge, a bitter reminder of his own repented stupidity.
‘I have been a failure,’ Londonderry wrote to Lady Desborough during his last years.13 What was in his mind was not an ill-judged attempt to make peace with Germany, a country for which he had lost all tenderness, but that he had fallen short of the standard to which he had always aspired. It had been Londonderry’s dream to prove that he, too, like the great mastermind of the Congress of Vienna who looked down from his walls in daily and silent reproof, could be a master of diplomacy.
Speaking to students at Nottingham University on Armistice Day 1931 about the possibility of a Nazi leadership in Germany, Lord Lothian, a gangling, friendly figure in a crumpled suit and with a ruffled mop of grey hair, cautioned them not to worry too much. The stories from Berlin were, just then, disturbing (Lothian had heard a few of them himself from Bob Brand); nevertheless, he remained optimistic that, once the German nation received what he vaguely termed ‘effective equality’, reforms and improvements would quickly follow on behind.
The inheritance of a title and five splendid houses in 1930 had done nothing to diminish the guilt that the former Philip Kerr felt about his contribution to the harsh conditions imposed on Germany in 1919, when he wrote (and then re-wrote) the war guilt clause by which the weight of responsibility had been laid upon the defeated nation. In 1937, Lothian gave away one of his family’s two principal seats, Newbattle Abbey in Scotland, to serve as a university summer school. The other, Blickling Hall, one of England’s loveliest Jacobean houses, was already, by the mid-thirties, playing a role in which its new owner sincerely believed. A great house, in Lothian’s view, was built for the use of society, not a single family. In time, this would encourage him to turn Blickling over to the National Trust, to draw upon as a model; in the interim, Blickling became a discreet and valued meeting place for politicians, newspaper magnates, industrialists and international leaders. When the doors to the great South Drawing Room – still furnished today as it was then by Philip’s sister, Minna – were closed, all disturbance was forbidden. Here, rather than the more celebrated Cliveden, was Britain’s chief seat of private discussion. Much of it revolved around Germany’s position in Europe.* 14
Hitler’s decision, in January 1935, to grant a two-hour interview to Lothian (a man he had never met before and whose few brief visits to Berlin had been strictly connected to Rhodes Scholarships issues) indicates how highly the English peer was regarded by the German Foreign Office. Ribbentrop, describing him to Hitler, identified Lothian as ‘the most powerful man in England outside government’.15 Often wildly inaccurate in his estimations, Ribbentrop, on this occasion, came close to the truth.
Hitler managed the 1935 interview with his usual skill. Readers of Lothian’s glowing accounts in The Times learned with joy that the German leader had no appetite for war (which was true, if Hitler could get the territories he wanted without bloodshed). Robert Brand, raising a cynical eyebrow, reported to his wife that Philip had returned praising Hitler (who had preached at him without pause for an entire hour) as ‘a naïve little carpenter prophet’.16 Lord Lothian, familiar with Nancy Astor’s fierce ways, seemed to think the Führer was rather sweet. Brand’s own, more abrasive, view was brushed aside.
Having taken up his stance, Lothian was like a knight locked to his lance. Nothing fazed him. When Hitler advanced upon the Rhineland in March 1936 (challenging the boundary lines ordained by the Treaties of Versailles and Locarno), Lothian sprang to the Führer’s defence. Geoffrey Dawson, editor of The Times, admiringly passed Lothian’s attitude on to a younger Oxford friend: ‘It’s their own back garden they [the Germans] are walking into.’17 Thomas Jones, the influential deputy secretary to the Cabinet, was enjoying the comforts of the South Drawing Room at Blickling during the Rhine invasion. Following his host’s lead, Jones informed a less honoured friend that a fortunate Europe had just bought herself twenty-five years of peace.
The Rhineland was never going to satisfy Hitler’s needs and Lothian was perfectly aware of that fact; eyeing Soviet Russia, Hitler opened a new argument in favour of allowing Germany to enlarge herself as a powerful bulwark against Communism. In 1936, while staying at Rest Harrow (the Astors’ fifteen-bedroom beach cottage near Sandwich), Lothian presented an attentive – and rather charmed – Ribbentrop with his thoughts about how German boundary lines could best be revised. In February 1937, a full seventeen months before the British public knew of Hitler’s plans to invade Czechoslovakia, Lothian once again spoke to Ribbentrop, reassuring him that there would be no intervention in Germany’s plans for expansion. He even added that some Cameroon colonies might be returned to her empire ‘if he [Hitler] did not go throwing his weight about’. That June, addressing a Chatham House audience upon ‘Germany and the Peace of Europe’, Lothian advocated a receptive attitude to Germany’s need for ‘Lebensraum’ or living-space growth.18
Nancy Astor, while devoted to Philip Lothian, disliked orders. Even Philip (whose restraining influence over a strong-willed and contrary character was much missed by her family in later years) could not get Parliament’s first elected female representative to pay a visit to Hitler in Berlin. She did, unwillingly, consent to give a lunch for Ribbentrop in London. The occasion was not a success. Jokes about Hitler’s moustache and his resemblance to Charlie Chaplin were ill-received; Nancy’s name went on the Nazi blacklist, together with that of her husband. Waldorf Astor, according to his son, David, was the only man who ever dared to suggest to Hitler, in front of several nervous aides, that the Führer ought to change his policy towards the Jews: ‘And Hitler got a spasm, an actual spasm.’19
The Astors’ friendship with Lord Lothian caused them considerable damage. It was he, above all, who earned them their unlucky and undeserved reputation for seeking friendship with Germany.
In the autumn of 1937, Lothian, acting as a close friend of the tall and ardently religious Edward Halifax, was drawn into plans to bring this future foreign secretary together with Hitler. Goering, mastermind of the scheme, had insisted upon absolute discretion. All went smoothly forward, with the sports-loving aristocrat paying his visit to Berchtesgaden in November under the guise – which deceived nobody – of attending a hunting exhibition. The lunchtime meeting (with Schmidt in attendance as interpreter, together with Dr von Neurath, Germany’s foreign secretary, and Ivone Kirkpatrick from the British Embassy) was judged to be a success. Halifax, while determined not to perform the required Salaam to his brown-uniformed host (the visitor raised his hat to the heiling crowds instead), found Hitler pleasant to deal with, although sorrowful that the British newspapers were so unkind to him. Good news came home. Philip Lothian was absolutely right, Halifax declared; Britain, so long as she stayed out of Germany’s projects in the east, need fear no war. King George VI was delighted. The more appeasement-minded newspapers hastened – once again – to tone down all critical references to the Reich.
A plan that had been hatched in the British Foreign Office, meanwhile, had gone awry. Robert Vansittart, permanent under-secretary of the Foreign Office, a position that put him supremely in charge at Gilbert Scott’s opulent palace for civil servants, loathed appeasement. He intensely resented Lord Halifax and Lord Lothian for arranging visits to further that suspect policy, and for doing so without his permission. Knowing that Goering had insisted upon discretion, Vansittart had waited until just before Halifax left England to leak news of the mission to London’s most gossipy left-wing journalist: Claud Cockburn, editor of a Soviet-funded news-sheet called The Week.
On 17 November, in a damaging article that entirely failed to derail Halifax’s visit, The Week identified ‘that little knot of expatriate Americans and “super-nationally-minded” Englishmen’ who were said to move in the Astors’ circle. It went on to accuse them of conspiring with Halifax to fix the English peer’s mission to Berchtesgaden in order to offer Hitler a ‘deal’. Accuracy was not The Week’s strong point; Halifax was not even at Cliveden on the weekend that Cockburn had pinpointed for the crafting of this insidious plot. It hardly mattered: the purpose, for a mischievous editor with a clear agenda, was to raise trouble for the wealthy Astors and their friends. Eleven days later, another small paper, Reynold’s News, repeated the allegation and added a catch-all name for the Astor circle. That phrase, ‘the Cliveden Set’, became part of the language after the brilliantly topical cartoonist David Low mocked the perceived group as ‘the Shiver Sisters’, skipping to the beat of Dr Goebbels’s baton. Taking their place in Low’s high-kicking chorus line of appeasers alongside Lord Lothian, Waldorf Astor and Nancy were the two newspaper editors with whom the Astors were most closely linked: Geoffrey Dawson of The Times and James Garvin of the Observer. (Shiela Grant Duff had left Garvin’s newpaper in 1937 because of his pro-appeasement policy.)
Low’s image, although swiftly taken for the truth, was not quite fair. Cliveden had never been just a haven for appeasers. Bob Brand, to offer one exception, was among the Astors’ most regular visitors; he was also fiercely anti-appeasement. Robert Barrington-Ward, the deputy editor of The Times and an ardent appeaser, never went to Cliveden at all.20
Robert Vansittart paid heavily for his tricksy intervention in government plans. In January 1938, he was given a fine new job title and a powerless role; Anthony Eden, his boss as foreign secretary, was replaced by Lothian’s friend and fellow appeaser Edward Halifax.* Nancy Astor consoled herself, when she finally encountered Claud Cockburn, by threatening to spit at him. Cockburn, unperturbed, remarked that he admired Lady Astor’s spirit.
Lothian’s intentions had been all for the best; recognition that he had dangerously misjudged the intentions of the Reich came slowly to a brilliant and opinionated man. Following the invasion of Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1939, Lothian recorded his new view of Hitler as ‘a fanatical gangster who will stop at nothing to beat down all possibility of resistance anywhere to his will . . .’21 But this was a private confession in a letter to a friend. It would take another three months before Lord Lothian was ready to announce his conversion in the House of Lords. In September, as evidence of his complete change of heart, Lothian took up Edward Halifax’s offer and went to Washington as ambassador to the United States.
Philip Lothian was arguably at his best in the final year of his life. Lord Halifax had given him the post of ambassador because of his extensive contacts both on Capitol Hill and within the American press. (It was Lothian who had helped the Washington Post get its world scoop on Wallis Simpson’s relationship with Edward VIII.) His mission, a delicate one, was to secure aid for England from an America that did not, in the autumn of 1940, relish the prospect of involvement in another war with Europe.
Lothian’s first step gave the advantage to a mistrustful America, offering her – the act of barter was diplomatically crucial – strategic landing spots in the Caribbean in exchange for a transatlantic gift of fifty thoroughly obsolete warships. A gesture had been made; America had ceased to be neutral. That symbolic act was all that the Ambassador required. Returning to England in November, Lothian pushed swiftly forward with the more complex task of persuading America to provide Britain with arms and financial aid. President Roosevelt, while privately supportive, needed to justify the proposal to Congress; Lothian, by persuading Churchill to spell out in a letter the imperative need for assistance, created the conditions that were required. The result was the Lend-Lease Act. Passed in 1941, it marked the introduction of a massive programme for arms production that would ensure, when America herself entered the war, that she was already well prepared.
Philip Lothian died of uremia on 11 December 1940, having refused – in accordance with the strict principles of his Christian Science beliefs – to be treated by the methods of conventional medicine. Speaking in the House of Commons, Churchill paid glowing tribute to a brilliant, conscientious and beguilingly charming man who had died – as Churchill carefully stressed – with honour.
Declassified documents and a fascinating documentary film, The Restless Conscience, have recently helped to highlight a connection between Lord Lothian and a fellow Christian Scientist. Helmuth von Moltke, half-English, toweringly tall and very handsome (an awed Leslie Rowse recalled Moltke as slender, grave, dark and glittering like a sword), came to Oxford in 1934 with the ostensible purpose of furthering his legal studies. But Moltke had also come to explore the mood in England about a possible change of government in Germany. Introduced by Lothian to a group of his fellow Round Table members in 1935, von Moltke spoke to them of his desire to bring Hitler to trial – murder was against every principle of his Christian Science conscience – before establishing a new democracy in Germany. Since Moltke made no further visits to England, it would seem that his proposals received a disappointing response.*
Lord Lothian is better known for his connection to another German student at Oxford, a latecomer to the resistance group whose larger meetings were held at Kreisau, the cultured, sleepily old-fashioned country home that had once belonged to von Moltke’s illustrious great-uncle, the celebrated Prussian general.
Adam von Trott was staying at Cliveden in 1931, as a guest of his Oxford friend, the liberal-minded and intensely shy David Astor, third son of Waldorf and Nancy, when he held his first political conversations with Philip Lothian. Philip, from this point on, would use his position as secretary to the Rhodes Scholarships to simplify Adam’s travels in and out of a Germany that had become, for anybody who did not retain the luxury of Wilfrid Israel’s dual nationality, a form of prison. Between February 1937 and November 1938, the young German – Adam was still under thirty – was free to live outside the country about which he remained so painfully torn, loving his Fatherland, hating its Nazi regime. Exile was not a luxury. Like Nikolaus Pevsner, Adam felt constantly homesick; unlike Pevsner, Adam von Trott, a young lawyer of impeccable Aryan background, always had the option to return and find employment.
Back in Berlin in the spring of 1939, and working in a branch of the German Foreign Office, Adam agreed to return to England as the unofficial representative for a plan that might, so the opposition hoped, fend off the growing threat of war, if only England’s approval could be gained. In June, Adam paid a return visit to Oxford where, or so they later recalled, old friends like Leslie Rowse and Maurice Bowra received his plans with horror and disgust. (Bowra, concerned for his new image as warden of Wadham College, actually claimed to have slammed his door shut in Adam’s face.)
Cliveden had proved more welcoming. On 3 June, Adam arrived there to address an assembly of influential politicians and journalists.
Handsome, assured, intelligent and forceful, Adam spoke, according to the eyewitness account given by David Astor in The Restless Conscience, about Germany’s unwillingness for a war and the German Army’s need for support in the undercover plottings of its resistance group. A good impression was made. The proposals – Germany’s right to retain the occupied Sudetenland, and, far more disturbingly, a promise from Britain and France to stand aside if Poland was annexed – were not dismissed. Plans were made for Adam to visit an unresponsive Chamberlain on 7 June, and then talk to Churchill. A carefully phrased document (it was drawn up by Adam and his friend Peter Bielenberg for the eyes of Hitler) informed the Führer that peace might yet be possible, and on acceptable terms.
Adam’s ambitious project was less warmly received by Shiela Grant Duff and her (horrified) Czech house-guest, Hubert Ripka. A warning letter was sent to Churchill, whose predictable disapproval of the scheme was swiftly conveyed to Cliveden. Waldorf Astor was not pleased. When David Astor travelled out to see Adam in Berlin later that summer, he went against the orders of his father.
In 1940, Adam von Trott married Clarita von Tiefenbacher. Three years later, he joined the intrigue against Hitler’s life that would lead, in 1944, to his show trial, to be followed by a slow, cruel death at the hands of the Gestapo, at the Plötzensee jail in Berlin.
Between 1969 and 1971, when the German Rhodes Scholarships were once again in the process of being revived, the author James Fox conducted a series of detailed interviews with the German survivors among von Trott’s colleagues at Oxford, and with Charles Collins, one of his closest English friends at Balliol. An eminent group who were, by 1969, dispersed across Germany, Britain and America, the former scholars still spoke with fondness about their days at Oxford. Karl Gunther Merz, who had rowed Oriel to victory in 1936, confessed that he still treasured the cut-down blades and carried them on his travels as a treasured mascot. Fritz Caspari recalled his pleasant surprise, on returning to St John’s in 1946, to be presented with a half-drunk bottle of Moselle. The bottle, carefully preserved in the college cellars, was still marked with his name, and with the date of his last drink: May 1936.
The scholars had not, contrary to James Fox’s expectations, formed a close community during their time at Oxford; it appeared, nevertheless, that they all held strong and individual views about Adam von Trott.
Dietrich von Bothmer, who went on to become an eminent museum curator, expressed disapproval of what he perceived as von Trott’s aristocratic approach to diplomacy. (‘I did not run around the country getting myself invited to country houses.’) Adolf Schleppegrell, the University College fellow who had attended the celebrated 1933 Oxford Union debate on king or country, proved equally dismissive. The idea of conducting undercover negotiations with England had been, he thought, ‘a pipe dream . . . unthinkable. I never understood it.’22 Fritz Schumacher of New College was uncomfortable about Adam’s decision to work from within the Nazi machine. To take employment from the Nazis, in Schumacher’s crisply expressed view, was equivalent to endorsing their regime. The only options for an opponent were either to go undercover (as Bonhoeffer had done) or to leave the country (as Schumacher himself had elected to do).23
But Adam von Trott – conceded by all the former scholars to have possessed exceptional charisma, charm and integrity – also won support from some of them for the heroism of his lonely endeavours to negotiate a peace. Charles Collins, his contemporary at Balliol, admired Adam’s persevering determination to convince the appeasers that their cause was worthwhile. It was tragic, he believed, that ‘a remarkable and a noble young man’ was never allowed to put his views to Churchill: ‘the consequences could have been significant’.24 Fritz Caspari agreed with Collins that Adam’s mission had deserved more support from England; Alexander Boker, from Corpus Christi, spoke more strongly still. He had himself provided Adam with some valuable contacts, including an introduction in America to Germany’s former Chancellor, Heinrich Brüning (enabled by the Academic Assistance Council to become an Oxford academic, before he took up a post at Harvard). Boker, writing to James Fox in 1969, expressed the view that Britain’s reluctance to commit to the German resistance had been a grave mistake. ‘I do indeed feel that Adam von Trott and other German anti-Nazis deserved more trust and encouragement and support abroad and especially in Britain than they received. If they had been able to give more encouraging reports to their fellow conspirators at home things may have taken a better turn for all of us . . .’25
Footnotes
* The widespread persecution of Roman Catholics in Nazi Germany seems never to have elicited a strong response in Britain, although Philip Lothian, himself brought up as a Catholic, organised a talk on precisely this subject for Lord’s Astor’s Chatham House forum.
* In 1933, Beverley Nichols had admired the Hitler Youth himself enough to welcome a group of them to the Garrick Club and take them to see an Ivor Novello play.
* Blickling continued the process of international lectures (under Lothian’s direction, and with many contributions from him) held at the Astor-owned Chatham House in St James’s Square. But Blickling was far less formal. Glints of Blickling life come through the memories of John Pert, a footman, of a kind employer, a teetotaller, who always had wines for his guests (‘decent, damn nice people’) and who was himself ‘a very quiet man’. Lady Astor was a different matter: ‘every time she came down the whole house had to be absolutely, as you might say, bunged up with cut flowers’. Lady Astor, plainly, got her way and – to a degree – ran the show. Tales of her sharing the Chinese Room with Philip and of their being found coming out of it together in night attire, in response to a fire alarm call, were provided by a spicy-minded later tenant and are unverified. (Jan Brookes, Transcripts of Life at Blickling Hall; Merlin Waterson, A Noble Thing: The National Trust and Its Benefactors (2011), p. 48.)
* Eden resigned in February 1938 over issues regarding the process of agreements with Mussolini that were being sought by Chamberlain. Eden did not, however, share the hostility to appeasement that was felt at that time by Vansittart. He had, in 1934, expressed a high opinion of Hitler, and was not, at the time of his resignation, opposed to the policy of negotiating with the fascist powers in Europe.
* Arrested at the beginning of 1944, Moltke was himself granted only the most tawdry of Nazi puppet trials before being murdered as a result of the 20 July plot, in which he had (for purely ethical reasons) refused to play an active part. Hava Kohav Beller’s The Restless Conscience was released in 2005.