Except for Buckingham Palace, whose householder is excluded from great decisions, these are the haunts of the powerful. Their epicenter is the Palace of Westminster, parts of which were built in the eleventh century after the Battle of Hastings. Westminster was a triumph of Victorian exuberance, with over a thousand rooms, a hundred staircases, over two miles of corridors, and an eight-acre roof. Towering, vast, Gothic, built in asymmetric style, and topped by Big Ben, which was installed in 1858, Westminster has an interior which is the accomplishment of an entire generation of skilled craftsmen, who embellished the palace’s robing rooms, private suites for parliamentary leaders, its ancient crypt and cloisters, division lobbies, smoking rooms, libraries, processional gallery, and, of course, the two Houses of Parliament—the House of Lords, with seats for 1,100 peers, and the House of Commons, which is too small to accommodate all 635 members of Parliament. That was deliberate. Regular attendance is rare, intimacy encourages lively debate, and “a crowded House,” in historic moments, creates a dramatic sense of urgency.

The Commons, now rebuilt, was Churchill’s principal forum for over forty years, and it should be envisaged as he knew it, unchanged in 225 years, with its timbered ceiling beneath which lay the well and carved chair of the Speaker, who determined which members of Parliament should have the floor and could intervene when the rules of the House were violated. On either side of the Speaker’s dias, stretching away from him to the far end of the chamber, rose five tiers of benches upholstered in green. An aisle—“the gangway”—cuts across each tier at midpoint. On the Speaker’s right sat MPs of the party in power; on his left, facing them across the well, were MPs of the Opposition. The lowest bench extending from the Speaker’s right to the gangway was reserved for the government—the prime minister and his ministers. It was called the front bench or the Treasury Bench, sharing a common ancestor with the brass plate adorning the door of No. 10.

Backbenchers—“private members”—sat wherever they liked, or, in a crowded House, wherever they could find room. Because of his past glories, however, by tacit understanding the first seat beyond the gangway on the lowest tier was reserved for Winston Churchill, the member for Epping. He cherished it; his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, also a rebel, had sat there in the 1880s. Only the width of the narrow gangway separated Winston from the governments he attacked so unmercifully throughout the 1930s. But his maxim was: “Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never… never give in, except to convictions of honour or good sense.”

Hitler had been vexed by Putzi Hanfstaengl’s jeu d’esprit, and understandably so. It was true that both Putzi’s Nazi idol and his British dinner companion were out of office, and certainly no one was paying much attention to the visitor from England, either here or in his own country. But Hitler, whose political antennae were exceptionally acute, knew how anxiously informed Europeans, and particularly Auslandspolitiker, were following his rising star. What he did not know was the keenness with which Churchill was watching him, or how doggedly Churchill would stalk him for twelve years, until the Führer of the Third Reich lay dead by his own hand in the ruined Reich Chancellery garden, a corpse enveloped by the writhing flames of a Viking funeral, while the blackened hulks of what had once been Berlin collapsed all round him.

Precisely when Winston became aware of freedom’s archenemy is uncertain. In his World War II memoirs he wrote of his stay in Munich, shortly before the Nazis came to power, “I had no national prejudice against Hitler at this time. I knew little of his doctrine or record and nothing of his character.”⁸ But that is an astonishing lapse of memory. By then he had been well informed about Hitler for two years, had published several appraisals of him, and had repeatedly warned the House of the imminent threat in central Europe. His perception was exceptional; an extraordinary number of his peers were completely hoodwinked.

Once he had moved into the chancellery, Hitler had let it be known that his door would be open to English political figures, and pilgrimages to him became fashionable. His guests returned glowing with optimism, reporting that the Reich chancellor, despite his savage rhetoric, was eager to reach a political settlement with other nations, an agreement exorcizing the threat of war for a decade. In retrospect this is puzzling. Diplomats had already forged such a settlement in two great treaties meant to guarantee peace, not for ten years, but for the rest of the century. The first had been signed at Versailles in 1919. Versailles was now discredited in the eyes of many, having sown seeds of resentment in Germany, but the Locarno Pact, enthusiastically signed by Germany in 1925, remained unslandered.

Yet within a decade of the Locarno agreement, Englishmen of power and influence were discussing new solutions as though this pact, despite its popularity in Germany, did not exist. Lord Lothian wrote The Times: “The central fact today is that Germany does not want war and is prepared to renounce it as a method of settling her disputes with her neighbors”—which is precisely what Germany had renounced, in writing, at Locarno. Thomas Jones, who had been in and out of Whitehall for a quarter century, wrote in his diary: “Rightly or wrongly, all sorts of people who have met Hitler are convinced that he is a factor for peace.” Even after the German chancellor’s aggressive intentions had become clear, Jones accompanied Lloyd George to Munich’s Braunhaus—Nazi headquarters—and returned with the conviction that “Hitler does not seek war with us. He seeks our friendship. If we fail him, he will turn elsewhere and we shall be sorry to have refused him”—which, of course, was precisely the response their Braunhaus host had meant to invoke.⁹

Of greater interest, however, were the impressions of Jones’s distinguished traveling companion. Meeting the press after he had been closeted with Hitler for an hour, Lloyd George said he regarded him as “the greatest living German,” and had “told him so to his face.” Back in England, Lloyd George wrote for the Daily Express—out of office like Churchill, he was struggling to make ends meet on his £300 salary as an MP, and journalism was a source of income for political celebrities—that the leader of the Nazis was “a born leader, a magnetic, dynamic personality with a single-minded purpose”: to keep the peace. Lloyd George declared that with Hitler at the helm Germany would “never invade any other land.” A year later he wrote to T. Philip Conwell-Evans, another admirer of the Nazis and one of Lothian’s closest friends, of “the admiration which I personally feel for [Hitler]…. I only wish we had a man of his supreme quality at the head of affairs in our country today.”¹⁰

No trap is so deadly as the one you set for yourself. Vernon Bartlett, a British journalist with a large following, spent forty minutes in Hitler’s study. Afterward he wrote of his host’s “large, brown eyes—so large and so brown that one might grow lyrical about them if one were a woman.” Actually, Hitler’s eyes were blue. Nazi goals were even applauded by Anglican clergymen, a group of whom expressed “boundless admiration for the moral and ethical side of the National Social programme, its clear-cut stand for religion and Christianity, and its ethical principles, such as its fight against cruelty to animals, vivisection, sexual offences, etc.”¹¹

Later there would be repentance, but the moving finger had writ, and neither sackcloth and ashes, nor magnums of tears could wash out a word of it. And none but Churchill, it seemed, was immune. The impressions of Sir John Simon, His Majesty’s foreign secretary from 1931 to 1935, are among the most memorable. In Hitler he saw not arrogance but a man “rather retiring and bashful and of a certain mystical temperament… unconcerned with affairs in Western Europe.” Later he described him to King George as “an Austrian Joan of Arc with a moustache.” One expects more from Arnold Toynbee, but Toynbee, equally spellbound by the Reich chancellor, declared that he was “convinced of his sincerity in desiring peace in Europe and close friendship with England.” The most painful toast to Hitler, for Americans, is a Walter Lippmann column which appeared in the New York Herald Tribune on May 19, 1933. Lippmann had heard a speech by the new chancellor, and described it as a “genuinely statesmanlike address,” providing convincing “evidence of good faith.” He told his readers: “We have heard once more, through the fog and the din, the authentic voice of a genuinely civilized people. I am not only willing to believe that, but it seems to me that all historical experience compels one to believe it.” He went further. Persecuting the Jews served a purpose by “satisfying” Germans’ yearning to “conquer somebody”; it was “a kind of lightning rod which protects Europe.”¹² Walter Lippmann was a Jew.

Churchill didn’t believe it. Ever since the Armistice he had been poring over reports from Berlin and Munich, winkling out evidence of a revanchist Germany. In 1924, when the future führer was still doing time after his failed putsch in Munich, Winston had warned that “the soul of Germany smoulders with dreams of a War of Liberation or Revenge.” That August he told readers of the Hearst newspaper chain that “German youth, mounting in its broad swelling flood, will never accept the conditions and implications of the Treaty of Versailles.” Over the years Hitler confirmed this view, and by 1930 he was declaring openly that once a National Socialist government had been formed, he and his Strassenkämpfer (street fighters) would “tear the covenants signed at Versailles into shreds.” Then they would rearm. “I can assure you,” he said in his thick, coarse voice, “that when the National Socialist movement is victorious in this struggle, the November 1918 revolution will be avenged and heads will roll.”¹³

Using diplomatic channels, Churchill made his views of the Nazis clear to the Germans. Among the classified documents seized when Allied troops entered Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop’s office on the Wilhelmstrasse in 1945 was a memorandum encoded K567878/A283, an appraisal written on October 18, 1930, by a German counsellor posted to his government’s London embassy. He reported that he had spent the past two days at a weekend house party where he had encountered “Mr. Winston Churchill.” Churchill had expressed his opinions of National Socialism “in cutting terms” (“mit schneidenem Wort”), remarking that it had “contributed towards a considerable deterioration in Germany’s external position.” His indictment of Hitler was specific. He believed him to be a congenital liar and was convinced, in the diplomat’s words, that although Hitler had “declared that he has no intention of waging a war of aggression, he, Churchill, is convinced that Hitler or his followers will seize the first available opportunity to resort to armed force.” Later, after the Nazis had seized power, Fritz Hesse, the press attaché in Germany’s London embassy, called on Winston to sound him out again. He was told that with Hitler in power there was only one solution to the “German problem”—“If a dog makes a dash for my trousers, I shoot him down before he can bite.” Hitler, after reading this, muttered that Churchill was a “Deutschenfresser”—a devourer of the Germans. Each man, therefore, was wary of the other from the outset.¹⁴

Political genius lies in seeing over the horizon, anticipating a future invisible to others. Churchill first warned of the approaching war in the Hearst papers on March 31, 1931, when Berlin and Vienna had announced the formation of a customs union. He wrote: “Beneath the Customs Union lurks the ‘Anschluss’ or union between the German mass and the remains of Austria.” Once that happened France’s dwindling population would see “the solid German block of seventy millions producing far more than twice her number of military males each year, towering up grim and grisly.” Nor would France be the only nation under the Teutonic shadow. Czechoslovakia had “3,500,000 Austrian-Germans in their midst. These unwilling subjects are a care.” And an Anschluss would mean that Czechoslovakia would not only be weakened by “the indigestible morsel in its interior” but would also be “surrounded on three sides by other Germans.” The Czechs would “become almost a Bohemian island in a boisterous fierce-lapping ocean of Teutonic manhood and efficiency.”

This was to be one of Churchill’s themes throughout the 1930s. The Germans, he told readers of the Strand in 1935, constituted “the most industrious, tractable, fierce and martial race in the world.” And Hitler, having risen “by violence and passion,” was “surrounded by men as ruthless as he.” Churchill wanted England to pursue a policy leading to a “lasting reconciliation with Europe.” But one could not deal with men who lied and murdered, men without honor or decency, led by a ruthless demagogue upon whose orders armed men tramped “from one end of the broad Reich to another.” Single-handedly Hitler was reversing the decision reached on the battlefield in 1918. “That is where we are today,” Churchill concluded, “and the achievement by which the tables have been completely turned upon the complacent, feckless, and purblind victors deserves to be reckoned a prodigy in the history of the world, and a prodigy which is inseparable from the personal exertions and the life-thrust of a single man.”¹⁵

In the House he spoke to empty seats, dozing MPs, and disapproving frowns. Once the cry “Winston’s up!” had brought members scurrying from the lobby and the smoking room. Now—like Edmund Burke six generations earlier, warning Parliament that unless the government changed its policy, Britain would lose her American colonies—he was largely ignored. There is a time to be eloquent, and there is a time when eloquence is wasted. Many of his greatest addresses, writes an Oxford historian, were delivered before “inattentive or skeptical audiences.” To Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, who was in Germany, the 1930s were a period in which he, “like so many others, tried desperately to convince those in authority of the growing menace of National Socialism.” They “failed miserably.” It was “in those days,” Wheeler-Bennett recalls, that “Winston was a tower of strength and comfort to us, the one British statesman who understood the warning which we sought to give, and who perceived, in all its starkness, the danger of a fresh outbreak of the Furor Teutonicus.”¹⁶

England, to paraphrase Melville, seemed cloaked in a damp, drizzly, foggy November of the soul. So did France. In his Paris home at 110, boulevard Raspail, Major Charles de Gaulle was writing Vers l’armée de métier, advancing his concept of a small professional army, mobile and highly mechanized, which, he believed, should replace the reigning static theories of war symbolized by the Maginot Line. In the London murk Churchill, with his moral compass, knew exactly where he was, but few Englishmen even glimpsed him. Sir Robert Vansittart, “Van,” the permanent under secretary of the Foreign Office, wrote: “Left or Right, everybody was for the quiet life.” To those who saw what lay ahead, the quietude was excruciating. Franklin Roosevelt, sworn in as president five weeks after Hitler became Reich chancellor, was lifting American hearts with his fireside chats, and an MP suggested to Churchill that MacDonald or Baldwin try the same thing. “If they did,” said Winston, “the fire would go out.”¹⁷

Lady Astor—née Nancy Langhorne of Danville, Virginia—was rarely reflective of the British public’s mood, but threading the maze of parliamentary intrigue with consummate skill, she always knew who was welcome at No. 10 Downing Street and who was not, even when those who were not included her. Joseph Stalin, receiving a British delegation headed by Nancy and George Bernard Shaw, had bluntly asked her about Winston’s political prospects. Her eyes had widened. “Churchill?” she had said. She gave a scornful little laugh and replied, “Oh, he’s finished.” Afterward, in Red Square, Shaw told the waiting press that he found the Soviet Union admirable, and would, indeed, advise young men from all over the world to pack up and settle in it. Nancy smiled and nodded, which, Virginia Cowles points out, was “reprehensible, because up until then she had been a tremendous anti-Bolshevik, denouncing the slaughter of the Russians in speech after speech.” Winston’s rhetorical weapons were of larger bore. He fired his broadside in the Sunday Pictorial, pointing out that the lady in question “denounces the vice of gambling in unmeasured terms, and is closely associated with an almost unrivaled racing stable. She accepts Communist hospitality and flattery, and remains the Conservative member for Plymouth.” The Russians, he said, “have always been fond of circuses and traveling shows,” and “here was the world’s most famous intellectual Clown and Pantaloon in one, and the charming Columbine of the capitalist pantomime.”¹⁸

In Parliament Churchill was supported by five MPs at most. The power of the party whips in those days was immense. Their effectiveness, Churchill wrote, combined with the “lethargy and blindness” of the three parties, made this “one of those awful periods which recur in our history, when the noble British nation seems to fall from its high estate, loses all sense of purpose, and appears to cower from the menace of foreign peril, frothing pious platitudes while foemen forge their arms.” A. J. P. Taylor observes that Winston had “periods of great distinction when he seemed right at the front, and he had a gift for sliding down the ladder again. His life was one of snakes and ladders. Until the very end of the 1930s, there were more snakes than ladders. Before then, his reputation, in a sense, was at its lowest ebb.” He had served twenty years in one cabinet or another, but because of his stand against independence for India, the “majority of the party,” recalled Harold Macmillan, then a Conservative MP, not only “regarded his attitude as reactionary and unrealistic,” but also questioned “the soundness of his judgment.” The consequence, Macmillan believed, was that “all his warnings about the German threat and the rise of Nazism, as he himself has described, were in vain.” Baldwin told his whips to keep a sharp eye on the outcast and to foster the view, Lord Winterton recalled, that Churchill was “an erratic genius; that he was utterly unreliable”; he had caused “unnecessary trouble to the Prime Minister and to all his colleagues in every Cabinet in which he has served by his volubility in disregarding every opinion except his own.” In sum, according to Boothby, “The breach between Winston and the Conservative leaders was complete.”¹⁹

In these years Churchill, in Lady Longford’s words, was often “far away from the ‘clatter and whirlpool,’ beached, like one of the boats he painted.” The British left, led by Clement Attlee and pledged to pacifism and disarmament, deeply distrusted him. Thus he outraged MPs on both sides of the Commons. But in Parliament, at least, traditional civility was observed. Outside Westminster was another matter. Afterward he said there had been “much mocking in the Press” about his fall from grace. The political cartoonists in Punch, the Daily Herald, the Express, and above all David Low in Beaverbrook’s Evening Standard were brutal. Public appearances became an ordeal for him. Chosen rector of Edinburgh University, he was unable to deliver his rectorial address; students hostile to his calls for a strengthened national defense repeatedly shouted him down until he gave up and left the platform. A particularly ugly book published in 1931 was The Tragedy of Winston Churchill. Disregarding all evidence, including the findings of the Dardanelles Commission, the author wrote: “Overriding the considered opinions of every seaman who knew his job, he [Churchill] rushed blindly into that wretched fiasco of the Dardanelles. He had great gifts but ‘nothing to offer’ any member of any party.” The author asked, “What has been Mr Churchill’s career in reality but the tragedy of the brilliant failure, of whom it has been repeatedly said that he secretly despises those who pass him on the road to office and power?”²⁰

Churchillian apocrypha has it that he was unwounded by all this, that throughout he was supremely confident that his hour would strike. On the contrary, his daughter Mary remembers, he was “far from resigned to his exclusion from the exercise of power”; the slanders, libels, and the distortions of his long career “hurt him deeply.” In the House an MP launched a personal attack on him, saying: “All his political life has been notorious for changing opinions, just like the weathercock, which vacillates and gyrates with the changing winds. It is about time this House took notice of this menace.” When Winston cited figures on the growing (and illegal) Nazi Luftwaffe and all but begged the government to strengthen the Royal Air Force, Sir Herbert Samuel, an eminent Liberal, compared him to “a Malay running amok.”²¹

His old acquaintances and former colleagues were convinced that he was misjudging the Nazis as he had India. Beaverbrook wrote that Churchill had “been everything to every party. He has held every view on every question…. He is utterly unreliable in his mental attitude.” After Hitler became chancellor, the Beaver predicted that “Winston Churchill will retire from Parliament. It is really the best thing for him to do.” Hindenburg died, Hitler’s power grew, and Max convinced himself that Winston’s speeches were stanzas in a swan song. “Now that he seems to have reconciled himself to the part of a farewell tour of politics, he speaks better than for years past.” Beaverbrook’s biographer writes: “It became clear even to Churchill that Beaverbrook was no longer on his side, nor even sympathetic to him.”²²

Nevertheless, the two men occasionally saw one another. Beaverbrook’s devotion to his newspapers approached that of a religieux; Churchill always produced good copy, so the Beaver paid him to write a column every other week for the Evening Standard. Malcolm Muggeridge was a young reporter for the Standard; at the next desk was Winston’s son. Randolph, now in his early twenties, was already difficult, constantly quarreling with his father and nearly everyone else who crossed his path. Churchill would nod briefly at his son as he passed through the Standard’s office with his fortnightly piece. Muggeridge recalls that Winston “just looked awful. You’d say to yourself, ‘There’s a guy who’s not well, or down on his luck, or dead broke.’ If you knew he was a politician you’d think, ‘He’s washed out, he’s had his chance and now he’s through.’ ” Randolph rarely mentioned his father in the office, but one afternoon, as he watched him depart, he said to Muggeridge, “He’s in a terrible state.” Then, in an amused tone: “He misses his toys.” Muggeridge asked, “What toys?” Randolph said: “His dispatch boxes.”²³

Even before Hitler became chancellor, British intelligence had confirmed Churchill’s unofficial estimates, based on his private sources of information, that the Nazis had over 400,000 storm troopers in uniform. During the Chancellor Crisis, Churchill had told the House: “I do not know where Germany’s parliamentary system stands today, but certainly military men are in control of the essentials.” Each concession which had been made to them, he said, each softening of the Versailles agreement, “has been followed immediately by a fresh demand.” To him the peril was clear. If the Germans were permitted to reassemble their military juggernaut, every nation bordering the Reich would be in mortal danger. These, he said, were facts. The British people were being told lies. The prime minister and his cabinet had developed a “habit of saying smooth things and uttering pious platitudes and sentiments to gain applause.” He could not recall “any time when the gap between the kind of words which statesmen used and what was actually happening in many countries was so great as it is now.”²⁴

MacDonald and Baldwin should have been aware of the threat. The British ambassador in Berlin, Sir Horace Rumbold, was an exceptional diplomat. In early March 1933, less than four days after Hindenburg had signed the emergency decree, Rumbold sent the Foreign Office a lengthy assessment of the new regime. The Nazis, he reported, had brought out “the worst traits in German character, i.e. a mean spirit of revenge, a tendency to brutality, and a noisy and irresponsible jingoism.” In the heart of the capital, whippings and clubbings could be seen in every block and every park, even the Tiergarten. Rumbold regretted the failure of foreign opinion “to have fully grasped the fact that the National-Socialist programme is intensely anti-Jewish.” It was no passing phase: “The imposition of further disabilities… must therefore be anticipated, for it is certainly Hitler’s intention to degrade, and if possible expel the Jewish community from Germany.”²⁵

The ambassador knew this dispatch would be unwelcome to both the prime minister and the Foreign Office, but he continued to send them stark appraisals, including an account of the March 23 Enabling Act and its immediate consequences. The Nazis, he wrote, had ordered local burgomasters to “carry on anti-Jewish propaganda among the people.” Jews were being “systematically removed from their posts” throughout the civil service because of “the accident of race.” Youths were being enrolled in infantry training programs, boys under sixteen were subject to military training, pilots were being recruited for a Luftwaffe—all in open defiance of Versailles. The departure of “so many writers, artists, musicians, and political leaders has created for the moment a kind of vacuum [because] they numbered among their following the intellectual life of the capital and nearly all that was original and stimulating in the world of arts and letters.” Most ominous of all, Jews, together with “Social Democrats, Communists, and non-political critics of Nazi policy” were being seized and sent to “large concentration camps” which were “being established in various parts of the country, one near Munich”—it was Dachau—“being sufficiently large to hold 5,000 prisoners.”²⁶

The ambassador was genuinely alarmed. He told Foreign Secretary Simon that he viewed the future with “great uneasiness and apprehension…. Unpleasant incidents are bound to occur during a revolution, but the deliberate ruthlessness and brutality which have been practiced [here] seem both excessive and unnecessary. I have the impression that the persons directing the policy of the Hitler Government are not normal. Many of us, indeed, have a feeling that we are living in a country where fanatic hooligans and eccentrics have got the upper hand.”²⁷

Rumbold was quietly replaced by Sir Eric Phipps, the British minister in Vienna. But Phipps also found the Nazis outrageous. He told the American ambassador that Hitler was “a fanatic who would be satisfied with nothing less than the dominance of Europe”; that although the Nazis would not invade neighboring countries until 1935, “war is the purpose here”; and that he had actually been approached by the Wilhelmstrasse with a suggestion that Germany and England divide Europe between them, to which he replied that such an agreement would “mean the end of international morality.” The Nazis, never troubled by the principle of diplomatic immunity, opened the British pouches and read these reports before they reached London. Hitler told Lord Londonderry that he hated “the looks of Sir Eric” and felt relations between the two countries would be vastly improved if Britain were represented “by a ‘more modern’ diplomat who showed, at least, some understanding of the changes taking place in Germany.”²⁸

“What are we to do?” a disconcerted Baldwin asked Thomas Jones. His predecessors would have known precisely what to do. The German führer would have been told that Great Britain did not welcome foreign advice in determining ambassadorial appointments. But Jones reflected the new statesmanship when he wrote in his diary, “If it is our policy to get alongside Germany, the sooner Phipps is transferred elsewhere the better.” He should be replaced, Jones thought, by someone “unhampered by professional diplomatic tradition” who could “enter with sympathetic interest into Hitler’s aspirations.” A candidate had already nominated himself. He was Sir Nevile Henderson, Britain’s representative in Argentina. Henderson had let the Foreign Office know that he had regarded Phipps’s assignment to Germany a “most unsuitable appointment” and that wags said “there is no British Embassy in Berlin at all, only a branch of the Quai d’Orsay.” So Phipps was retired “at his own request” and Henderson took over. His colleagues quickly nicknamed him “our Nazi ambassador to Berlin.” Hermann Göring and he became fast friends. Labour MP Josiah Wedgwood noted how he resembled those MPs who had “flocked to Germany at Hitler’s invitation, in like manner,” forgetting their “duty and their country’s standards.”²⁹

But British diplomats and visiting Englishmen were not the government’s sole sources of what was happening in Berlin. In the early years of the new regime, Paul Joseph Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry concentrated on preaching its glories to the German people. Cultivation of the foreign press was of lesser concern. As it happened, this was the high summer of foreign correspondents. The best of them—who covered Europe—were intelligent, well-read men, fluent in several languages, who had developed contacts and sources across the full spectrum of society, in the Reich and beyond. Long before Hitler came to power they knew of Nazi brutality and had sent accounts of it home.³⁰

Even after Goebbels decided that something must be done about the foreign press in Berlin, little was. His problem was compounded by geography. Germany’s capital, like England’s, represented a concentration of great power in a small neighborhood. But in London a combination of ceremonial pomp, the discouraging mazes of Whitehall, and a tradition of studied rudeness toward outsiders created a web of safeguards which could be penetrated only by an insider of Churchill’s stature. The heart of the Reich was more vulnerable. In the Zitadelle the great ministries stood shoulder to shoulder along the Wilhelmstrasse, with Hitler’s huge new chancellery at the southern end. People wandered in and out on the flimsiest of excuses. The northern end of the Wilhelmstrasse ended at the Linden. There, the Pariser-Platz and the Brandenburg Gate marked the eastern edge of the Tiergarten, Berlin’s largest and loveliest park, which spread westward behind the black, burned-out hulk of the Reichstag building. The Reichstag now met in the Kroll Opera House, four hundred yards inside the park. In the midst of all this, on the Pariser-Platz, the best possible strategic location, stood the Hotel Adlon, where the most gifted correspondents lived and worked. Because they continued to be dedicated and resourceful, the outside world was told what was happening even when diplomats in the Berlin embassies were silenced.³¹