VICTORIA Regina—“the Old Queen,” still a vivid memory among Englishmen in their forties—would have been shocked speechless. Here was London, the most civilized city in the world, and there in its streets were the rabble, identifiable by their ragged clothes, their faces clenched in rage, and, when they raised their voices, the unmistakable accents of their class. To affluent spectators, the rioting seemed illusory. Many were looking at the poor, really looking at them, for the first time in their lives. Usually the patriciate encountered them only in servile roles, and the privileged had been raised to ignore them, even to speak of them in their presence as though they were not there. But in 1932, with the Depression at rock bottom, the poor could not escape notice. There were too many of them, and they were too angry.
A London constable needed only a brief glance to distinguish between the classes. Shaw’s Pygmalion to the contrary, it wasn’t just a matter of clothes, expressions, and accents. No speech therapist or couturier could alter their posture, mannerisms, and physique. Lower-class diets were so poor that emergency programs were needed to provide them with fruit, vegetables, and, for each schoolchild, 2.67 ounces of milk a day. Generations of malnutrition, of stooping in tunnels or bending over textile looms, had given workmen slight stature, poor posture, coarse complexions, weak eyesight, and hollow chests; and even among nubile women, breasts were small and limp. Individually they were unattractive and easily overpowered. But when they coalesced into a mob they could constitute a threat to the tall, fair, erect gentry. Of course, the gentry did not dream of meeting force with their own force. It was, as most of them said, a matter for the police.
Those of less insensitive conscience were shocked. Yet they shouldn’t have been. There had been plenty of warnings. People were edgy. The city’s celebrated civility was beginning to fray. Every household in Mayfair or Belgravia had its tales, hushly told, of rude beggars who had accosted ladies outside Harrods or St. Paul’s and grew ugly if denied sixpence. And Whitechapel had actually insulted a member of the Royal Family. The Prince of Wales’s brother Prince “Bertie”—the future King George VI—had paid a compassionate visit to the city’s starving East End. According to sworn testimony, published in The Times, His Royal Highness had been driven back by ragged cockneys shaking grimy fists and shouting: “Food! Give us food! We don’t want royal parasites!”1
This lèse-majesté was the prelude to the riots of October 1932. The first seems to have been spontaneous. The cockneys who had defied royalty had been released by the magistrate with a warning. Emboldened, they decided to sortie into the city proper. The sheer size of the multitude was frightening. They poured into the streets by the thousands, and soon they were bearing down on Lambeth Bridge. Twenty times the bobbies launched truncheon charges; finally, as a last resort, they blocked their bridgehead with lorries parked hubcap to hubcap. The barricade held until the bruised, scarred, and exhausted throng fell back.2
The second onslaught, a march on London from the outer reaches of the country, was more menacing. Its moves had been carefully planned by a dour, disheveled youth named W. A. L. Hannington, “Wal” to his men and “Red Wal” in the London newspapers. The men behind him called their trek a hunger march. It was a long one. They had come from towns as far as western Wales and northern Scotland, bearing a petition for relief signed by a million unemployed workers, with the expectation that the prime minister would receive their delegation. In the countryside local charities fed the marchers, but after a cabinet minister told the House of Commons that Bolsheviks were behind their protest and it was “up to the Communists to feed them,” they were given few handouts in the capital.3
Their enormous petition was too cumbersome for the street brawlers to carry, so they checked it at Charing Cross Station and then swarmed up the Strand to Trafalgar Square, stoning limousines and using tree branches—hacked off in Hyde Park—to club well-dressed men. Bobbies waded into them, swinging billy clubs, and broke their momentum at Marble Arch. England’s most sacred political institutions, it seemed, were safe. Then it was learned that a second column, five thousand strong, had emerged from concealment in Green Park and was crossing St. James’s Park, in their rear. Debouching by the Guards Memorial, this mob advanced on No. 10 Downing Street. The only policeman in sight was the single bobby who, by tradition, stands by the prime minister’s front door.
At this point, less than four hundred yards from their objective, the marchers’ luck turned against them. The open ground between the rioters and the entrance to Downing Street was occupied by the parade ground of the Royal Horse Guards. As long as anyone could remember, the only duty of these cavalrymen had been to perform ceremoniously for admiring tourists. Now, preparing to fight for King and Country, they buckled on their glittering helmets, mounted their handsome steeds, drew their gleaming sabers from their polished scabbards, and formed a very thin red line. The sheer weight of the mob could have overwhelmed them, but the marchers, most of them in London for the first time, seemed awestruck. They wavered and milled around. By the time they had regrouped, reserves from Bow Street were there in force, sending them reeling back toward Trafalgar Square. Anticlimax followed. At Charing Cross Station, where they produced their claim check, a courteous clerk explained that the petition, with its million signatures, had been classified as an incentive to riot and confiscated by Scotland Yard. Beaten and bitter, they rode home on British railroads, which, relieved to see them dispersed, charged only token fares.4
Television did not exist, and radio news was closely monitored by Sir John Reith, czar of the BBC, so the failed demonstrations had little impact on the British public. Few, if any, could have predicted that the suppressed riots, with their threat of social upheaval, would later play a role in the formation of the most disastrous foreign policy in the history of Britain and its empire. The significance of the incidents was largely overlooked by Fleet Street. It was a dreary time; people were less interested in momentous events than in escapism.
In the early thirties, the average Englishman’s exposure to American culture—and he enjoyed it immensely—was chiefly confined to motion pictures, now in the transition period between silent films and talkies. In Westerham, the local cinema was The Swan. Winston Churchill, trudging up its steps with little Mary in tow to see MGM’s lavish Ben-Hur, was, at least in this, typical of his countrymen. Like them he loved Westerns. His favorite was Destry Rides Again, with Tom Mix. He favored movies featuring drama, excitement, action, slapstick—Cecil B. DeMille’s The Sign of the Cross, Douglas Fairbanks in The Iron Mask, Walt Disney’s anthropomorphic Mickey Mouse cartoons, and the Marx Brothers at the peak of their lunacy. With the arrival of sound had come popular music from abroad: “Singin’ in the Rain,” “Beyond the Blue Horizon,” “Tiptoe through the Tulips,” and Marlene Dietrich, at twenty-nine huskily serenading Emil Jannings with “Falling in Love Again” in Josef von Sternberg’s first German talkie, Der blaue Engel. For Britons who preferred to buy British, homemade pickings were slim, with one shining exception: Noel Coward. These were the years when Gertrude Lawrence, young Laurence Olivier, Beatrice Lillie, and Coward himself played roles he had created, when his name was writ large on the hoardings of four London theatres: Private Lives at the Phoenix; Cavalcade at the Drury Lane; Words and Music at the Adelphi; and, at His Majesty’s Theatre, Bitter Sweet.
In the back gardens of their semidetached bungalows in Streatham or Battersea, British housewives’ gossip and snobbery had always served as shields against unpleasantness. The most exciting rumors in 1932 centered around the Royal Family, especially the world’s most eligible bachelor, HRH the Prince of Wales, now thirty-eight. It was no secret that King George and Queen Mary were putting heavy pressure on their middle-aged heir to marry someone suitable; they had just spent over £10,000 renovating and redecorating Marlborough House, at the west end of Pall Mall, making it both comfortable and elegant for their new daughter-in-law, whoever she might be. Of course the Prince would find a bride soon, the housewives told one another, hanging clothes out to dry. He knew his duty. And, they added, nodding vigorously, he would marry well, giving Great Britain a future queen who would become the pride of the Empire.
The Empire! The mere mention of it aroused patriotic Britons like Churchill, made them brace their backs and lift their eyes. If there was any fixed star in their firmament it was an abiding faith in the everlasting glory of their realm—Dominions, Crown Colonies, protectorates, Chinese treaty towns—which, in sum, was over three times the size of the Roman Empire at its height: 475 million people, 11 million square miles, ninety-one times the area of Great Britain, encompassing a quarter of both the earth’s surface and its population. The fourth edition of The Pocket Oxford Dictionary defined “imperial” as “magnificent”; “imperialism” as the “extension of the British Empire for protection of trade, union of its parts for defence, internal commerce, etc.”; and “imperialist” as an “advocate of British imperialism.”
Britons still scrupulously observed Empire Day, giving schoolchildren a half-holiday. They joined or encouraged the British Empire League, the British Empire Union, the Victoria League, and the Patriotic League of Britons Overseas. They cried “Hear, hear” when the new viceroy of India, Lord Willingdon, foresaw “a Great Imperial Federation, when we can snap our fingers at the rest of the world.” Baldwin declared: “The British Empire stands firm, as a great force for good. It stands in the sweep of every wind, by the wash of every sea.” Colin Cross, the historian, has observed that “with authority reaching to every continent, the British Empire was literally a world power; indeed in terms of its influence it was the only world power.”5
Historian James Morris has written of the Empire: “Most Britons still considered it, all in all, a force for good in the world…. The Monarchy was still immensely popular in most parts of the Empire, even in India, even in Ireland.” Schoolboys in the United Kingdom and the United States alike were taught that in battle the British “always won,” as indeed they had in every major war since the eighteenth century.
All the imperial trappings were kept intact. The prime ministers of the Dominions continued to meet in London, ostensibly to coordinate economic policies, though none were forthcoming. Dominion children studied books with such chapter titles as “The Thread That Binds Our Race,” and Boy Scouts—not only in the Empire but also in America—wore broad-brimmed Boer War hats and shared with the South African police the motto “Be Prepared.” Lord Beaverbrook’s newspapers, particularly the London Daily Express, made expansion of the imperial domain a crusade. Graduates of “Oxbridge”—Oxford and Cambridge—still sailed abroad to spend lifetimes as imperial proconsuls, looking forward, late in life, to the rewards of CMG, KCMG, or GCMG. In New Delhi, at state banquets, the viceroy’s entrance into the dining hall was preceded by two elegantly uniformed aides-de-camp; and when the orchestra played “God Save the King,” the Indian servants in their gold and scarlet liveries stood poised behind each guest.6
And yet…
There were signs, for those who could read them, that the Empire was, in Churchill’s gloomy words, on a “downward slurge.” La belle époque was over. Most of the Crown’s subjects, abroad as well as at home, felt comfortable with imperialism. With the exception of the Daily Worker, every British newspaper supported it. Few, even in Ireland, were offended when the thick voice of their sovereign was identified on radio for his annual, unbearably boring Christmas broadcast (“Another year has passed…”) by an announcer with a plummy accent as “His Britannic Majesty, by Grace of God and of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and of the British Dominions beyond the Seas, King, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India.” But the mystique was fading; indeed, for some it had already gone.7
Earlier generations of Englishmen had found colonial uprisings endlessly fascinating. They had pored over newspaper accounts (many written by young Churchill) and tacked pages of the Illustrated London News—depicting the Mutiny, Chinese Gordon’s Last Stand, Kitchener at Omdurman, and the expeditions relieving Boer sieges of Ladysmith, Kimberley, and Mafeking—to the walls of their homes. Challenges to the supremacy of the Union Jack had stirred their blood, and they had responded eagerly to calls to the Flag, Duty, Race, and the White Man’s Burden. In the early 1930s millions of Britons, especially the elderly, members of the upper class, and those who had reached their majority before 1914, still felt that way. But imperial enthusiasm was dwindling among the working classes and the young. They were weary of the White Man’s Burden. The new mood was caught by Aldous Huxley; to him the Raj resembled the Old Man of Thermopylae, who never did anything properly. “For some reason,” young Jock Colville wrote in his diary, “no subject is more boring to the average Englishman than the British Empire.”8
British imperialism was, in fact, an idea whose time was going. The issue had already been decided. In the House of Commons the master blueprint governing the imperial future, the Statute of Westminster of 1931, decreed that the Mother Country and her dominions were “autonomous communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate to each other in any aspect of their domestic or foreign affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations.”
George V, who treasured his legacy, watched in dismay as his imperial role beyond England’s shores shrank to that of a posturing mascot. Confused, he minuted in November 1929, on the eve of the Depression: “I cannot look into the future without feelings of no little anxiety about the continued unity of the Empire.” His apprehensions were well founded, though perhaps for reasons too cosmic for him to grasp. Empires are the sequelae of historical accidents. England, an island and therefore a trading nation, had gained control of the high seas just as colonies became ripe for plucking. As long as sea power remained dominant, imperial institutions were invincible; under Victoria it was British policy to keep the Royal Navy—330 warships, manned by 92,000 tars—larger than the combined navies of any other two powers.9
Air power would prove to be the ultimate blow to the Empire’s role as the world’s one superpower, but the first great blow to the imperial future had been dealt by the Great War. In the red month of August 1914, when England’s poet laureate promised Oxford and Cambridge students that if they enlisted they would find “Beauty through blood,” all 450 million subjects of the Empire went to war, bound by a single declaration from their king-emperor. They sprang to arms in a trance of ardor, even elation. By Armistice Day 3,190,235 of the King’s subjects had fallen in the slime and gore of trench warfare, 1,165,661 killed in action, 962,661 of them from Great Britain. Over 2 million soldiers had been wounded, thousands of them crippled and maimed, destined to be public wards for the remainder of their lives. Add to these the nearly half-million young widows and fatherless children, and one finds that two years after the war 3.5 million Britons, nearly 10 percent of the population, were receiving a pension or an allowance.10
In the year of the Wall Street Crash, when Robert Graves’s American publisher issued Goodbye to All That, his powerful evocation of service in the trenches, the Nation thought it striking “not that he tells the truth about the war but that it took him so long to discover it.” But the lag applied not only to Graves; it was characteristic of an entire British literary generation. The most extraordinary thing about England’s disenchantment with the war is that it didn’t surface for over ten years. The reading public had been fed the self-serving memoirs of those responsible for the disaster and the thin fictional gruel of Bulldog Drummond and Richard Hannay. Those who had remained home were simply incapable of absorbing the truth. Aging Tommies told them that sixty thousand young Englishmen had fallen on the first day of the battle of the Somme without gaining a single yard. Sixty thousand! It couldn’t be true. Those who said so must be shell-shocked.11
The coalescence came in 1929. On January 21 the curtain rose on the first of what would be 594 London performances of Journey’s End, the ultimate in antiwar plays, by Robert C. Sherriff, a thirty-three-year-old former insurance man who had served in the East Surrey Regiment’s Ninth Battalion through the bloody spring of 1917. Its audiences left the Savoy Theatre stunned but primed, now, for Graves’s memoir; for Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War; for the German novelist Erich Maria Remarque’s Im Westen nichts Neues, which appeared that spring in Berlin and was immediately translated by a London publisher as All Quiet on the Western Front; and, the following year, for Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer.12
The Great War may have been the first historic event in which reality outstripped the imagination. In the 1980s it is difficult to grasp the public innocence of that earlier generation, and how it recoiled when confronted at last by the monstrous crimes which had been committed in the name of patriotism. As time passed, the yeast of bitterness worked in the public mind and its emotions. By 1932 readers had accepted Sassoon and Graves as sources of the revealed word, and traveling troupes were presenting Journey’s End in every post of the Empire. Newspapers and magazines picked up the now-it-can-be-told theme; pacifism became as fashionable as war fever had been less than twenty years earlier. On February 9, 1933, the Oxford Union voted 275 to 153 to approve the resolution “that this House will in no circumstances fight for King and Country.” Eight months later, in what may have been the most significant by-election of the decade, a Tory in London’s East Fulham, whose Conservative majority after the last campaign had been fourteen thousand votes, was swamped by an obscure Labour challenger. Labour’s man had told the constituency that he would “close every recruiting station, disband the Army and disarm the Air Force,” and demanded that England “give the lead to the whole world by initiating immediately a policy of general disarmament.” His victory margin was five thousand votes, representing an extraordinary swing of 26 percent. It was no accident. Over the next four months constituencies ranging widely in character but representative of the country’s mood elected antiwar candidates by margins ranging from 20 to 25 percent.13
Churchill was alarmed. In the House of Commons he was the League of Nations’ chief supporter, but the league now faced a trembling future. He became preoccupied with national security. Unilateral disarmament would be madness, he told Parliament. The by-elections also distressed Stanley Baldwin, leader of the Conservative party, but his response was very different. To him the loss of safe seats was a grave matter. If the voters wanted disarmament, he decided, that was what he would give them.14
The real threat to British security, His Majesty’s Government held, lay within. Indeed, Conservative MPs believed that the menace faced them just across the well of the House of Commons, on the Labour benches. Actually, His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition was itself a mildly conservative party, and had proved it in 1924 while occupying the front bench for nine months. Many of its members were former Liberal MPs who had switched parties once they saw that Labour was the only realistic alternative to Tory rule. Nevertheless, Conservatives believed that if England was to remain the England they knew and loved, they must remain in power.
Until now British Communists had all been members of the working class, or shabby young men wearing steel-rimmed glasses who mouthed the weary party line in Hyde Park, responding to questions with incomprehensible jargon and quotations from Marx, Engels, and Lenin. In the early 1930s communism became respectable, then fashionable, then a distinction among intellectuals and university undergraduates. Among the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) members were W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and Stephen Spender. Oxford’s October Club, a CPGB cell, had three hundred dues-paying students. Cambridge started later, but soon one of every five Cambridge men had signed on, among them one H. A. R. (“Kim”) Philby.
Those who dismissed this as an example of British eccentricity, or of typical undergraduate irresponsibility, were silenced by news from the United States, the world’s most affluent nation. Ragged mobs of the homeless and penniless were occupying U. S. public buildings—including one statehouse—and twenty-five thousand war veterans, arriving in Washington with their families to plead for relief, were routed with tear gas and bayonets. American recruits to the party included John Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson, Erskine Caldwell, and Edmund Wilson, who called Russia “the moral top of the world, where the light never really goes out.”
Every generation cherishes illusions which baffle its successors (who passionately defend their own), but intellectuals are expected to view the world with healthy skepticism. Those who visited the Soviet Union in the starkest years of the Depression were so easily deceived, so eager to accept the flimsiest evidence, so determined to believe the most transparent misrepresentations, that one feels that some of the scorn directed nowadays at the appeasers of Nazi Germany should be reserved for men who ought to have known better. Bernard Baruch asked Lincoln Steffens, “So you’ve been over into Russia?” and Steffens replied: “I have been over into the future, and it works.”15
He had seen what Stalin wanted him to see, on a rigged tour, the kind generals stage for visiting politicians. Everything paraded by him had worked, but he had not seen into the future or even the present. As one of the most celebrated journalists of his time, Steffens should have investigated his host’s policy of collectivization and its ghastly results. Only a willing dupe could say of such a holocaust that it worked. If it did, so did Auschwitz.
Actually, the moral top of Edmund Wilson’s world, where the light never really went out, had entered a period of murk which masked monstrous crimes—crimes which were suspected but not acknowledged until Nikita Khrushchev revealed them in 1957—all committed in the name of the people they were destroying. The catastrophe had begun with Lenin’s death in 1924. Churchill, his archenemy, nevertheless recognized Lenin’s greatness: “The strong illuminant that guided him was cut off at the moment when he had turned resolutely for home. The Russian people were left floundering in the bog. Their worst misfortune was his birth; their next worst—his death.”16
Lenin had left a vague “political testament” which recommended that Joseph Stalin, then secretary-general of the Communist party’s Central Committee, be dismissed. Stalin suppressed this document and, in his role as secretary-general, joined two accomplices in a ruling triumvirate which expelled Stalin’s chief rival, Leon Trotsky. (Eventually, Stalin would order the murders of his accomplices and Trotsky.) Stalin consolidated his position as master of the Kremlin, and by 1932 the Soviet Union was in the grip of a reign of terror which would reach its peak in the great purges of 1934–1938. To the world, however, Stalin insisted that his rule was benign. In the early summer of 1932, interviewed by the German biographer Emil Ludwig, he denied that he was a dictator, denied that he reigned by fear, and declared that the “overwhelming majority” of the laboring population in the U.S.S.R. was behind him. Their support, he said, accounted for the “stability of Soviet power,” not “any so-called policy of terrorism.”
At that time no Russian translation of Mein Kampf existed, but in this exchange Stalin had instinctively followed a principle set down in Adolf Hitler’s tenth chapter: “The great masses of the people… will more easily fall victims to a big lie [eine grosse Lüge] than to a small one.” Everything the Russian dictator had told Ludwig was the exact opposite of the truth. Soviet peasants were already in the toils of a misery far more wretched than anything known under the czars. Abandoning Lenin’s managed economy, with its quasi-capitalistic incentives, Stalin had launched a series of five-year plans moving twenty-five million farmers from their lands into collectives. Troops and secret police rounded up protesters and murdered, exiled, or imprisoned them in an expanding net of concentration camps which systematically worked them to death. Nevertheless, collectivism failed. The Ukrainians were devastated by famine. Stalin rejected their appeal for help and actually exported grain while ten million of them starved to death.
By the autumn of 1932 England’s ruling classes were afraid of their own countrymen, and their fear alarmed Labour, whose MPs heard wild tales of plots by His Majesty’s Government to turn Britain into a police state. Hugh Dalton, MP, son of a clergyman but a committed socialist, visited Stafford Cripps, a member of the Labour hierarchy. Dalton wrote in his diary that Cripps “thinks there is a grave danger of Fascism in this country,” that Metropolitan-Vickers, the munitions manufacturers, “are ‘probably supplying arms to British Fascists.’ ” Cripps, Dalton wrote, believed that “Churchill will probably defeat the Government on India next spring and form a Government of his own, with a Majority in this Parliament and then ‘introduce Fascist measures’ and ‘there will be no more general elections.’ ” Dalton, appalled, thought that “this seems to me to be fantastic and most profoundly improbable.” But Harold Laski echoed Cripps, telling Dalton that he had “heard ‘from an inside source’ that members of the [all-party national] Government are discussing the advisability of not having a General Election in 1936, nor till such later date as the Government advises the King that it would be safe to return to party politics.”17
Cripps and Laski were looking into the wrong closets. British politics were unthreatened by communism. But the domestic disorders, the dole, and the increase in CPGB memberships profoundly affected His Majesty’s Government’s foreign policy. HMG’s subsequent dealings with a resurgent Germany make no sense unless seen in counterpoint with Tory anxiety. The London hunger riots had, or so it seemed to them, been a sign that England’s class system was disintegrating. The remarkable stability of British society was rooted in a social contract whose origins lay in the medieval relationship between lord and serf. Within the memory of living men, employees could be arrested for the most trivial of offenses, and an employer was entitled to police help in finding a runaway employee. Under the Prevention of Poaching Act, suspicious constables had possessed the power to stop and search anyone in “streets, highways, and public places.”18
Although unwritten and largely unspoken, the terms of the social contract were handed down from generation to generation and seldom challenged. Now the hunger riots had changed all that. The precise distinctions between the classes would never be the same. If mobs could roam London, those in power reasoned, their troubles with the lower middle, working, and underclasses had just begun. They were right, but wrong to blame Moscow and its British minions. Englishmen kept their places when they and their families were fed, clothed, and housed. The unemployed, however, knew no such restraint. The man without a situation took little risk, and might attract attention to his cause, by stoning limousines, joining a demonstration—or joining the Communist party. To those in power such men, by their very numbers, were alarming. Nearly a quarter of the country’s work force was jobless, and in some dark pockets the figure reached 50, 60, or even 70 percent. England had to export or die. That was the fate of an island nation. Now goods lay in mountainous stacks in warehouses or on wharves. Desperate, His Majesty’s Government adopted draconian measures—£24,149,060 in new taxes and £2,344 in spending cuts.
Among those affected by the cuts were British tars. An able seaman’s pay was reduced from four shillings a day (ninety-seven cents) to three shillings (seventy-three cents). Shattering three centuries of tradition, men of the Royal Navy mutinied. Over thirteen thousand of His Majesty’s sailors anchored in Cromarty Firth, Scotland—men whose ships bore such proud names as Nelson, Repulse, and Valiant—defied their officers, sang “The Red Flag,” and elected leaders for what can only be called their own soviet. Only a handful were punished. Their pay was restored. The Admiralty angrily denounced HMG’s capitulation, calling it a ghastly precedent. The government agreed but said it had had no choice.
And, of course, the grim facts did bear political implications. In December 1929 there had been just 3,200 Communists in Britain, 550 of them organized in cells. Now the hammer and sickle was carried through the heart of London. Membership in the CPGB was growing rapidly as the Depression deepened, increasing by 140 percent, then 259 percent, then 282 percent. And these were only the hard-core, card-carrying members. The number of sympathizers was far larger; in two by-elections the Communist candidates received, respectively, 31.9 and 33.8 percent of the vote.
At the same time, Communists everywhere had become more militant and more submissive to Moscow. This was one result of the Comintern’s Tenth Plenum in 1929. Stalin had decreed that local deviations from the party line be suppressed and that all loyal members move to set “class against class.” They were told to fight, not only capitalism, but also the labor movement. Since the Comintern had been founded to “accelerate the development of events toward world revolution,” the threat to established order everywhere was open. In London it was taken seriously; to conservative Englishmen the possibility of a Communist Britain seemed very real.
Several Tories with strong influence on their party’s leadership contemplated executing a momentous pivot in the history of British diplomacy. No one spoke of it publicly, nor was it whispered in the House of Commons smoking room. Even as theory, it was still in the fetal stage, and it might never come to term. Only a few Conservatives were committed to it. But others, including members of the party hierarchy, thought it had merit.
They pondered Benito Mussolini’s popularity in Italy, where, by 1932, he had been ruling for ten years. It had been a good decade for Italians. Il Duce’s dreams of building another Roman Empire evoked a tepid response, but his managed economy had prospered; his countrymen’s standard of living had risen. His goals, a biographer notes, had “a great appeal to many people in Italy in the years immediately following World War I; the Russian Revolution had terrified the leaders of the Italian financial and industrial community, and Mussolini’s program seemed to many of them to be an effective means of countering any similar development in their own country.”
British intelligence reported that in Germany, also suffering from the Depression, Adolf Hitler was following the Duce’s lead, presenting himself to the Ruhr’s Schlotbarone (smokestack barons) as a shield against the Reds. Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party—Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, “Nazi” for short—had remained obscure as long as the German economy flourished. Now the country’s industrialists, alarmed by the growing strength of communism in the working class, looked upon the Nazis with increasing approval.
At the time, the fear of Moscow was understandable. The Soviet Comintern, dedicated to the overthrow of other governments, was not just noisy; it was working, undermining the foundations of Western civilization from within. Communism was still new, virile, and virulent; cheerful tributes to it by leftists in the democracies drove democratic rightists, who were equally blind, toward Hitler. As T. R. Fehrenbach neatly states, “The Conservative Government of Great Britain, the one real order-keeping power in the world, was too intent upon the threatened social revolution to see the imminent nationalist revolt Hitler’s Germany was mounting against the democratic world.” They persuaded themselves, as Fehrenbach puts it, that a Germany ruled by Nazis could become “a counterpoise against the national and revolutionary ambitions of the Soviet Union.”19
This was the rationale for the policy emerging in Whitehall and the Quai d’Orsay, of befriending the dictator states and appeasing their resentment of their postwar plight. The signs in Germany, to the men in high Tory councils, were encouraging. They pointed to the imminent establishment of a strong anti-Soviet regime in Berlin. Should that happen, they intended to befriend its leaders. Together, they believed, Englishmen and Germans had the stamina to forge a shield Comintern agents could never penetrate.
If Britain succeeded in courting Germany, His Majesty’s Government would have a lot of explaining to do, much of it to Englishmen who had been targets of Mausers and Krupp howitzers for four years and could never have prevailed without the gallant poilus who fought with them shoulder to shoulder, even when the Allied line nearly collapsed in the last spring of the war. An understanding with Berlin would mean the rejection of Britain’s fellow democracy. Questions in the House would be endless. But as the new men saw it, the time had come to put wartime bitterness aside. France, they felt, lacked vigor, determination, and sound business sense.
The French were exhausted. In France même—France outside Paris—the country was quiescent. The fertile northern provinces had been transformed into a wasteland of crumbling trenches and rusting barbed wire; over half the Frenchmen between the ages of twenty and thirty-two—1,385,000—had been killed there between 1914 and 1918. The survivors were too maimed, or too feeble, to lift the tricolor in triumph. To be sure, the City of Light, the nation’s capital, still glowed. Under the chestnut trees of the Champs Élysées, fashion reporters who had penetrated the closely guarded private openings of the city’s grand couturiers forecast lower waists, straighter lines, fuller sleeves, and high, wide, and handsome shoulders. Hats were to be saucy: Arab fezzes, clown and cossack caps. Chanel would offer gloves of 18-karat spun gold, Regny an evening gown which could be converted into a bathing suit, and Rouff a naughty evening gown, with a zipper extending from the throat straight down to the bottom hem “for moonlight bathing,” or, as cynics pointed out, “swift coupling.”
In all world capitals it was assumed—it had, indeed, become a newspaper cliché—that France possessed “the finest army in the world.” In London those pushing for a divorce from Paris and a remarriage in Berlin spread rumors of plans for a French preemptive war against the new German state. The Times, possibly floating a trial balloon, warned: “In the years that are coming there is more reason to fear for Germany than to fear Germany.”20
Actually, confidence in the army of the Third Republic had been illusionary since 1917, when fifty-four French divisions—750,000 men—had mutinied. Officers had been beaten and even murdered; an artillery regiment had attempted to blow up the Schneider-Creusot munitions plant; trains had been derailed; 21,174 men deserted outright. Trenches were abandoned, and had the Germans known there was no one on the other side of no-man’s-land, they could have plunged through and won the war. The bitterness of the poilus survived the Armistice; their leaders told them their side had won, but they knew, in Churchill’s words, that victory had been “bought so dear as to be almost indistinguishable from defeat.”21
Gallic military thinking was now wholly defensive. On January 4, 1930, both houses of the National Assembly had voted to build, on the Franco-German border, a great wall to be named for the minister of war, André Maginot. It would cost seven billion francs when completed in 1935. To be sure, the line did not protect the wooded Ardennes, but Marshal Philippe Pétain dismissed fears for the forest: “Elle est impénétrable.” This judgment by the hero of Verdun was unchallenged. To young journalist William L. Shirer, arriving at the Arc de Triomphe in 1925, it seemed that “no other country on the Continent could challenge France’s supremacy. The nightmare of the German threat, which had haunted the French for so long, had been erased.” Their ancient foe, prostrate in defeat, its army reduced to a token force, its leadership “forbidden by the Versailles Treaty to build warplanes or tanks, or heavy guns or submarines or battleships, and saddled with the burden of reparations, was no longer a menace.”22
That, too, was illusion. Germany was not the Germany the Allies thought they had created at Versailles, and France seemed to be drifting into a strengthless oubli. Alistair Horne, the popular British historian, saw “the urge for national grandeur” replaced by “a deep longing simply to be left in peace.” In its capital, however, the mood quickened. It could be felt in the Café Flore and the Deux Magots, for example, the haunts of young Jean-Paul Sartre and his mistress, Simone de Beauvoir; in the rêves fantastiques of Jean Giraudoux and Jean Cocteau; in the Revue Nègre, the Ballet Suedois, the Ballet Russe, the extravagant theatre of Sergey Diaghilev, the fox trot dansomanie, Josephine Baker, Inkichinoff’s film La Tête d’un homme, the Prevert brothers’ film L’Affaire est dans le sac; and—the favorites of all the left-wing critics—the new stars Gilles and Julien, a pair of pacifist anarchists who performed in a Montmartre cabaret and then on the stage at Bobino’s, wearing black sweaters and making songs like “Le Jeu de massacre” instant hits after singing them just once. The manic mood, Horne wrote, was “Anything for spectacle.” This was the France of legend: the land of tumbling francs, tumbling governments, and saucy, tumbling filles.23
La Force de l’âge (The Prime of Life), Simone de Beauvoir’s memoir of the late 1920s and early 1930s, provides a more perceptive picture. Her depiction of French intellectuals contrasts starkly with the rising Nazi Wildheit in Berlin, where the excesses and decadence of the postwar decade were yielding to a flirtation, and then a lethal embrace, between philistinism and savagery. To be sure, there was ferocity in the French capital, too, as Communist gangs fought with members of the Croix de Feu, the Action Française, the Jeunesse Patriotes, and, later, Le Francisme, the most bizarre of the leagues. But they were a lunatic fringe; the intelligentsia considered them vulgar and so never mentioned them or even acknowledged their existence. “Peace seemed finally assured,” de Beauvoir wrote in the fall of 1929. She felt she was living in “a new ‘Golden Age,’ ” that the swelling of the Nazi ranks across the border was “a mere fringe phenomenon, without any serious significance.” She, her lover Sartre, and their friends watched the Nazi seizure of power “quite calmly,” she later wrote, and while she briefly noted the Nazi expulsion of Einstein, she was more dismayed by the closing of Berlin’s Institute of Sexology.24
“We refused,” she later wrote, “to face the threat which Hitler’s behavior constituted to the world.” Henri Barbusse wrote in Le Monde that the Nazis could not possibly put Germany’s economy back on its feet; it was doomed, and after the collapse the German proletariat would reclaim its heritage. Marianne, a radical-socialist weekly, preached a steady pacifist line, coupled with announcements that if Hitler became chancellor he would soon be overthrown. In 1932 Romain Rolland drew up a manifesto, published in Le Monde and Europe and signed by André Gide, among others, which called upon all members of the French intelligentsia to vow “resistance against war.” Writers, thinkers, academicians, continued to predict—despite mounting evidence to the contrary—that the two nations were moving toward a Franco-German rapprochement. Every leftist, every intellectual, was shouting simultaneously: “Down with fascism!” and “Disarmament NOW!” Even as Germany’s army swelled with illegal recruits, France’s intelligentsia, de Beauvoir wrote, saw “no threat to peace”; the only danger was “the panic that the Right was spreading in France, with the aim of dragging us into war.” In 1914 “the whole of the intellectual elite, Socialists, writers, and all,” had “toed a wholly chauvinistic line.” Their lesson “forbade us to envisage the very possibility of a war.”25
This perilous illusion was not limited to France’s intellectual community. Barbusse’s shocking novel of the trenches, Le Feu, reached millions who had never heard of Sartre, Romain Rolland, Louis Aragon, André Gide, or Paul Eluard. Barbusse died in 1935, just as Hitler was becoming a household name in French provinces; over 300,000 readers followed his coffin to Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Insulated in their Gallic world, the people for whom the Führer and his Reich were sharpening their swords assumed that everyone who had suffered in the trenches, or knew and loved those who had, shared their disgust of fighting. They should have been more attentive. There is a revealing vignette in La Force de l’âge. Sartre and de Beauvoir are boating down the Elbe to the rock of Heligoland. Sartre strikes up a conversation with a fellow passenger, a forty-year-old German wearing a black peaked cap and a morose expression. The German tells Sartre that he had been a sergeant in the Great War, and, his voice rising, says: “If there is another war, this time we shall not be defeated. We shall retrieve our honor.” Sartre thinks the poor fellow feels shamed because his side lost; being simple, the ex-sergeant needs reassurance that war’s horrors lie in the past, never to return. He mildly remarks that there is no need of war; everyone wants peace. But he is facing a sorte he has never seen before: a real Kämpfer (warrior), incapable of forgetting or forgiving. Glaring, the man replies, “Honor comes first. First we must retrieve our honor.” De Beauvoir wrote: “His fanatical tone alarmed me…. Never had I seen hatred shine so nakedly [à nu] from any human face.” She tried to reassure herself “with the reflection that an ex-serviceman is bound to hold militaristic views,” yet added, “How many such were there, who lived only for the moment when the great day of revenge would come?”26
Churchill was warning of Germany’s yearning for revenge, but the casual visitor to Berlin that fall of 1932 would have seen few signs of it. The Zitadelle—the monumental government buildings over which the kaisers had reigned—seemed more effete than Paris and devoid of that indefinable tone which had once given the city its Lutheran ambience: an air of hard, clean, righteous high purpose, of noble masculinity, of spartan Prussian virtues at their most demanding and most admirable. Now all that was gone. Berlin was, in fact, conspicuous for its lack of any virtue whatever. It had become the new Babylon.
Before the Great War it had been Paris which had seethed with sinful romance, illicit intrigue; if you wanted to spend a weekend with your young secretary, you asked Cook’s to book you a suite near the Place de l’Étoile. In those days Pigalle, the mean streets behind Les Halles, the notorious maisons de joi in the winding little rue de la Huchette, a block from Notre Dame, had been the most lurid attractions for those exploring what then passed for European decadence. No more: it now was Berlin. “Along the Kurfürstendamm,” wrote Stefan Zweig, “powdered and rouged young men sauntered, and in the dimly lit bars one might see men of the world of finance courting drunken sailors”; while at transvestite balls, “hundreds of men costumed as women and hundreds of women as men danced under the benevolent eye of the police.”27
Over two million young German women were destitute widows. The more desperate (and attractive) of them became prostitutes, seeking prey in the alleys near the Hauptbahnhof. Among them were muscular whores with whips and mothers in their early thirties, teamed with their teenaged daughters to offer Mutter-und-Tochter sex. Tourists were shocked by the more infamous night spots: the Kabarett Tingle-Tangle, the Apollo, the Monokel (“die Bar der Frau”—for lesbians), and the White Mouse, whose most sensational performer, and the role model for thousands of German girls in the Weimar years, was Anita Berber, who danced naked, mainlined cocaine and morphine, and made love to men and women sprawled atop bars, bathed in spotlights, while voyeurs stared and fondled one another. Anita was dead at twenty-nine. So, by then, was the Weimar Republic.
It was in these years that Europeans began importing not only movies but also the most trivial and seamiest exports of American mass culture. Everyone knew about Prohibition gangsters, and how they led to political corruption. That made them attractive, even fascinating. Viennese, Romans, Berliners, and Parisians formed cults around les bandits américains, as they were called in France, and, in one Lutzow-Platz graffito, “die Häuptlinger der Chicagoer und New-Yorker Unterwelt—Al Capone, Jack Diamond, und Lucky Luciano.” So sedulously had they been aped in Italy that twenty-two-year-old Alberto Moravia devoted his first novel, Gli indifferenti (The Time of Indifference), to a devastating parable of depravity in Rome. New Orleans’ Mardi Gras was the model for Germany’s new Faschingszeit; the Tiller Girls at Berlin’s Scala Theater were a frank imitation of the Ziegfeld chorus line; a clever wisecracker was a Schnauze (big mouth). Night clubs featured bands mimicking—and sometimes unintentionally parodying—American jazz combos. Week after week an advertisement ran in Munich’s Süddeutsche Monatshefte crying: “So dürfen Sie nicht Charleston tanzen!”28
It had become fashionable to blame the global Depression on the collapse of the New York Stock Exchange three years earlier. Certainly the Crash was an important link in the chain; but the causes, the implications, and the sequence of events were international and too complex to be within the range of understanding then. The Great War had impoverished victors and vanquished alike. The Allies, however, believed they could recover their losses by making the losers pay. It was one of history’s more tragic errors.
Once they began computing the cost of civilian property damage—not to mention what was called “the estimated capitalized value” of the five million Allied fighting men killed in the war—the Allied statesmen found themselves dealing with stupendous sums, billions of dollars. At Versailles they finally arrived at a rough figure: $31,530,500,000. This was their reparations bill, they declared, and Germany must pay it. The Allies, under the threat of renewed fighting, demanded an immediate down payment of five billion dollars—nearly thirty-three billion in 1980s currency. Also, the Germans must pay off Belgium’s war loans. Also, interest on the unpaid balance. Also, a 26 percent tax on all German exports.
The terms were exorbitant, vindictive, and preposterous. John Maynard Keynes denounced Versailles as “a Carthaginian Peace.” Churchill, who disapproved of the entire treaty, especially the punitive clauses, called the reparations “monstrous” and “malignant.” Actually, there was no way that the leaders of the new German republic, struggling to find its feet in Weimar, could meet this absurd bill. They tried. But their government had no international credit. Germany’s prewar commercial system had been destroyed by the Allied blockade. Rich Germans, anticipating heavy taxation, were fleeing abroad with their fortunes. After seven months, the mark sank to an all-time low: five million to the dollar. Then it dropped out of sight.
As the worldwide economic crisis deepened, Americans rescued the tottering German republic, first with loans and then with outright gifts of over ten million dollars. Once the New York stock market crashed, however, Wall Street had to look to its own. Helpless, Weimar staggered on the brink of ruin, maintaining the appearance of solvency by feats of legerdemain. Anti-Americans, forgetting the huge gifts, blamed Germany’s plight on the United States. Some Tories even resented the fact that Churchill’s mother had been American. Stanley Baldwin spoke contemptuously of “the low intellectual ability” of people in the United States; Neville Chamberlain agreed with him.
On one count Americans were guilty. European respect for U.S. diplomacy had been skidding since President Woodrow Wilson’s departure from Versailles. In 1919 the U.S. Senate had rejected the Versailles covenants, including membership in the League of Nations, Wilson’s creation, and his pledge to guarantee France’s borders. After Wilson’s death a succession of Republican presidents, reflecting the mood of U.S. voters, had been turned inward, devoting their attention to domestic issues. During the interwar years this doctrine was christened isolationism. At the same time, America’s leaders kept nagging their former allies to pay their unpayable war debts. England could easily have paid her war debts to the United States had France paid her debts to England. But France was flat broke, which meant the British were stuck, which meant hands-across-the-sea met in a clammy grasp. Washington was unsympathetic. President Calvin Coolidge didn’t want to hear about the Exchequer’s problems; he wanted cash. He said: “They hired the money, didn’t they?” Before the war Americans had been popular in Europe. But by the early 1930s Washington’s repeated insistence that the hired money be repaid merely heightened the tension Over There.
Even more troubling was the U.S. absence from Geneva. It had dealt a devastating blow to the League of Nations. But in turning their backs on the problems of other great powers American isolationists were not alone. Immediately after the signing of the peace treaties in 1919 London drifted into a mild form of the American introversion, and one by one the chancelleries on the Continent followed their example, leaving the intricacies of external affairs to their foreign ministries.
The professional diplomats, delighted, turned to what they did best, assembling in huge conferences, immaculate in their striped trousers, wing collars, and pince-nez, solemnly initialing pacts and protocols which were later signed, on their recommendation, by their governments. By the end of the 1920s plenipotentiaries had bound the Continent in a fantastic web of signed documents bearing waxed seals and streaming ribbons, documents which, had they been honored, would have kept the peace. Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Rumania were linked in the Little Entente. France was pledged to the defense of Poland; Italy to Yugoslavia, Albania, Hungary, and Austria. The climax was the cluster of pacts solemnized at Locarno, Switzerland, in 1925. Locarno guaranteed the German-French and German-Belgian frontiers and provided for the arbitration of any disputes between Germany on the one hand, and France, Belgium, Poland, and Czechoslovakia on the other. Finally, to assure the territorial integrity of the Czechs, France signed a separate treaty promising to declare war on Germany if the Germans violated Czechoslovakia’s borders. Italy and Britain joined in the mutual guarantee of peace in western Europe, and though British obligations were vague, Britain was already pledged to stand by France in any war.
The Wilhelmstrasse had sent a delegation to Locarno. Its legates moved gracefully through the great halls, elegant and charming, clicking heels, kissing hands, and in the “spirit of Locarno,” as it was being hailed, added their signatures to the others on December 1, 1925. Foreign correspondents were baffled. Why were Germans there? These pacts were negotiated by nations with armies and navies. As a military power Germany had ceased to exist. The Treaty of Versailles had drawn the Junkers’ teeth. Their army, or Reichswehr, as it had been renamed, could not exceed 100,000 men, including officers. Even tiny Belgium outnumbered them. They were allowed no military aircraft, no General Staff, no conscription, and no manufacture of arms and munitions without written permission from the triumphant Allies. Their navy was restricted to six battleships, six light cruisers, twelve torpedo boats—and no submarines. Weimar Germany was forbidden fortification of her own frontiers, and a demilitarized buffer zone, the Rhineland, separated her from the French and Belgians. Violation of any of these provisions were to be regarded as a declaration of war, punishable by an Allied military occupation of the German republic. Thus manacled, the defeated country constituted a threat to no one. Her delegation, the inquiring newspapermen were told, had been invited to Locarno as a gracious gesture, a sign that the wounds of 1918 were healing.29
Veteran correspondents were skeptical. The foreign policies of great powers, they knew, are not guided by generosity. Nor were they in this instance. The fact was that the Germans had acquired their invitations by diplomatic blackmail. Versailles had stigmatized not one, but two great nations; the victors had turned their backs on both the defeated Second Reich, excluded from the peace conference, and the new Soviet Union, which in 1917 had taken Russia—then an Allied power, fighting Germany—out of the war. Walter Rathenau, a brilliant Weimar statesman, had seized his chance. Taking advantage of a Genoa conference at which European diplomats were discussing the economic prospects of the Continent, he had slipped away to meet a Bolshevik delegation at nearby Rapallo. Since the Russians had not participated in the 1919 peace settlement, they could join Germany in renouncing all war claims. Extensive agreements, signed at the same time, drew them closer together. Two months later, on June 24, 1922, Rathenau was murdered by right-wing German nationalists. But the Rapallo Treaty stood.30
The Allies had been shocked. They realized, for the first time, that the independent German government could make important commitments without their consent. Thus the invitation to Locarno. There, Rathenau’s successor, Gustav Stresemann, smoothly reassured them. Nervous Allied ministries were reminded that Germany was their shield against the Soviet Union.
Germany’s former enemies listened carefully, wanting to believe. The Second Reich was dead. They cherished the hope that a stable German republic would serve as a bulwark against Russian adventurism. Another Allied incentive was anxiety; they knew that the kaiser’s embittered officer corps refused to believe their army had been defeated on the battlefield and that the fighting qualities of German men were awesome.
A third motive was guilt. The Great War, by bankrupting both sides and destroying an entire generation of future leaders, eroded the confidence of the victors. Man, shocked by his inhumanity to man, was uncomfortable; he sought ways to ease his conscience. The transformation was not achieved overnight, but as the years passed a feeling deepened in London and Paris that the Central Powers had been shabbily treated at the Versailles peace conference. Allied casualties had been appalling, but at least they knew the jubilation of winning. When Germany and the two weaker members of her alliance had laid down their arms, they had lost 3,393,193 dead and 8,267,532 wounded. In defeat every conceivable humiliation had been visited upon them. Private property abroad belonging to German citizens had been summarily confiscated. The Kiel Canal and the country’s five great rivers had been designated international waterways, like the English Channel or the Mediterranean. German representatives at the peace conference had been forced to sign the treaty’s Article 231, accepting responsibility “for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies.”
Friedrich Ebert, provisional president of the new Weimar Republic, had called it “unbearable.” The chancellor cried: “May the hand wither that signs this treaty!” The Allies, unmoved, issued an ultimatum. If the terms were not accepted, Allied troops would invade Germany. Ebert appealed to wartime chief of staff Paul von Hindenburg. Could such an attack be resisted? No, the field marshal replied, but he could not “help feeling that it were better to perish than sign such a humiliating peace [Schmachfrieden].” This was an outright evasion of responsibility. Because of it, Ebert, unsupported by the officer corps—the men who had actually lost the war—approved the treaty nineteen minutes before the Allied ultimatum ran out. It was an inauspicious start for the German republic.31
In November 1932 Churchill urged revision of Versailles “in cold blood and in a calm atmosphere and while the victor nations still have ample superiority, [rather] than to wait and drift on, inch by inch and stage by stage, until once again vast combinations, equally matched confront each other face to face.” As the searing memoirs, best-selling novels, gripping plays, and popular films put the conflict in a new perspective, newspapers on both sides revealed the vast profits reaped by munitions tycoons. Holding the Germans solely responsible for the tragedy of 1914–1918, people now realized, had distorted the truth and violated the honor of the losers. It had amounted to an imposition of vindictive conditions on helpless men, forbidden, at the time, even to protest.32
By the early 1930s, however, the strongest emotion aroused in Germany’s neighbors was primitive terror. The Germans knew it; they had deliberately provoked it in two wars, and had even given it a name, Schrecklichkeit (frightfulness). The nineteenth-century Prussian strategist Karl von Clausewitz had encouraged it as a means of shortening wars by putting the enemy “in a situation in which continuing the war is more oppressive to him than surrender.” Teutonic troops, armed and dangerous, were frightful. They had practiced Schrecklichkeit in 1914, when bands of French and Belgian guerrillas defending their own soil had led to German executions of civilians, hostages, and prisoners of war. “Suddenly,” Barbara Tuchman writes, “the world became aware of the beast beneath the German skin.”33
In the 1920s and 1930s, accounts of these crimes were suppressed by pacifists in das Ausland, that revealing German term which welded all nations outside the Reich into a single collective noun. The new line was that all tales of German atrocities in the Great War had been Allied propaganda. But Belgians who had treated their invaders with disrespect had in fact been led before firing squads as early as the second day of the war. German records proved it. If Belgian refugees slowed the German advance, hostages were picked at random and killed.34 One can find their gravestones today, inscribed: “1914: Fusillé par les Allemands”—“Shot by the Germans.”
It was the dread of another such nightmare which provided the more powerful drive behind the grid of interlocking treaties culminating at Locarno. Even after Versailles, Germany remained the most powerful nation in Europe, with a population exceeding that of either Britain or France by thirty million. Geographical position alone seemed fated to guarantee Germany domination of Europe. Hitler’s Nazis attracted the attention of chancelleries of Europe as Hitler set forth his goals, giving priority to the union of all Germans in a greater Germany. The very idea made foreign ministries tremble. Were it achieved, the smaller nations would confront a monolith of eighty-two million Teutons. A reconstituted Reich under strong leadership could reassemble the kaiser’s dismantled juggernaut.35
Thus German signatures on the Locarno Pact had been welcomed. Despite Germany’s violation of Belgian neutrality in 1914—dismissing the Wilhelmstrasse’s written pledge not to do so as “ein Fetzen Papier” (“a scrap of paper”)—it was still inconceivable that a civilized nation would break its word. Great powers did not invade other states until war had been formally declared. If Locarno and Weimar’s other postwar commitments were to be treated as scraps, diplomacy would be meaningless. Therefore, foreign ministries watched the tumultuous course of German politics in 1932 with increasing uneasiness. The Nazis were scum, men bereft of honor as Europe’s ruling classes understood it. Late in the year a French agent, burrowed in the Wilhelmstrasse, sent the Quai d’Orsay a shocking report on the ten-year-old Russo-German treaty which Walter Rathenau had negotiated in Rapallo. A secret protocol, drafted by Foreign Minister Rathenau himself, had specified that the Russians would set aside tracts of land where the Germans would lay new foundations for the development of armament technique. There, too, German bombers and fighter planes were being assembled and German pilots, navigators, and bombardiers trained. The agent in Berlin was absolutely reliable. His French control in the Deuxième Bureau was badly shaken, but after he had regained his poise he felt baffled by one detail. Rathenau’s assassins had been identified and interrogated. Their militant nationalism was clear. They wanted a new, rearmed Reich. Why had they slain a diplomat who had rendered their cause so priceless a service? The decoded reply was: “Rathenau was a Jew.”36 The Quai d’Orsay was dumbfounded. Would they, they wondered, ever understand the Germans?
In Berlin the world’s longest breadline stretched down the Kurfürstendamm. Over fifteen million Germans were on the dole. In the streets husky, brown-shirted storm troopers (Sturmtrupper), wearing their high-crowned caps and black-on-white-on-red swastikas (Hakenkreuz, literally “hooked cross”), clubbed and battered men suspected of leftist sympathies, Jews of every age and sex, and anyone who failed to raise a stiff-armed heil when a Nazi band marched past under the banner “Deutschland erwache!” (“Germany awake!”).
None of this was, in itself, extraordinary. In 1932 hunger and bloodshed haunted every great capital. But there was a significant difference in German turmoil. The drafters of Versailles had mutilated the kaiser’s Second Reich in every way except the one which counted most. The internal structure of Wilhelmine Germany had been left intact. Because the judges in Weimar courtrooms had belonged to the prewar privileged class and regarded the republic as a puppet regime installed by enemies of the Reich, Nazi street fighters who murdered their political opponents in broad daylight, with dozens of witnesses testifying against them, received suspended sentences and five-mark fines. At the same time, supporters of the republic were sentenced to long prison terms for revealing, in speeches or newspapers, that the Reichswehr was rebuilding the army in defiance of Germany’s pledge to the Allies. Franz L. Neumann writes: “It is impossible to escape the conclusion that political justice is the blackest page [schwärzeste Seite] in the life of the German Republic.”37
Leniency was extended even to those rightists for whom the aristocracy had little sympathy. After the Armistice, Munich became the center of revolutionary conspiracies, including the successful plot to kill Rathenau and Hitler’s unsuccessful putsch of 1923, an act of high treason in which nineteen men lost their lives while the Nazi leader fled the scene and hid from the police. Tracked down and arrested, Hitler spent only nine months in Landsberg prison, cossetted by every comfort the warden could provide, including writing materials. When he left his spacious “cell,” he carried the manuscript of Mein Kampf under his arm, and as he emerged from the prison gate his supporters hailed him as a victorious hero.38
Until the Depression the Nazis had been a lunatic fringe. In 1928 they polled some 810,000 votes—2.6 percent of those cast. The economic crises brought them swollen rolls and made Hitler a national figure. Oswald Spengler wrote: “In the heart of the people the Weimar Constitution is already doomed!” Two elections—in 1930 and 1932—demonstrated that the Nazis, although shy of a working majority, had emerged as the country’s largest political party. It was also the most violent. “We want a dictatorship!” Hitler cried, and his deputies left no doubt of their scorn for democratic procedures. In the Reichstag and the Prussian Diet they wore their uniforms, swung their fists and clubs, and disrupted any session which seemed about to reach agreement on a substantive issue by hurling any object which came to hand, including, according to one account, “inkwells, water bottles, desk drawers, chairs, ledgers, broken table legs.” Having driven all others from the chamber, the Nazis “spent the next half-hour triumphantly roaring old war songs.”
With few exceptions, Churchill among them, foreign politicians were unalarmed by Hitler. To Time, amused by his pretentiousness, Hitler was a “bristle-lipped, slightly pot-bellied” forty-three-year-old who often “stroked his tuft of brown mustache.” Those with no command of the German tongue regarded him as a comical figure bearing a close resemblance to Charlie Chaplin. Even foreign correspondents underrated him. They reasoned that the heart of the Nazi constituency lay in the lower middle class, and that the upper classes would be alienated by the party’s leader, whose wartime rank had been that of corporal.39
Until 1932 they had been right. National Socialism had been a stigma. Among well-born Germans, the Nazi party was regarded as coarse. But that autumn they were beginning to understand that the door of history had been shut on their Augustan Age of princes and potentates and plumed marshals and glittering little regular armies—on all the fanfaronade that had marked their disciplined, secure world. In the waning autumn of 1932, when Americans were voting Franklin D. Roosevelt into the White House, the German patriciate was reassessing its view of Hitler. The eminent Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, always reflective of their opinion, abruptly abandoned its hostile treatment of National Socialism and urged Reich President Hindenburg to overcome his “strong personal dislike” of the Nazi leader and appoint him chancellor “in the interests of that tranquillity required for business revival.”40
Once Hitler moved, he moved fast. Nazi deputies, though still short of an absolute majority, outnumbered the Social Democrats nearly two-to-one and dominated the Reichstag. Nevertheless, Field Marshal Hindenburg, Ebert’s successor to the figurehead post of president, refused to appoint Hitler chancellor. The Chancellor Crisis followed. Running the government was impossible without the Nazi deputies, who, on Hitler’s orders, vetoed each Hindenburg nominee for the office. Then Franz von Papen and General Kurt von Schleicher, the two strongest conservatives, agreed on a remarkable solution. Name Hitler chancellor, they told the Reich president, and they would manipulate him. Pandora’s box was thereupon pried open, and on January 30, 1933, Hitler was sworn in as chancellor, or, as he preferred to be called, Reich chancellor—chancellor of the Empire. His expression, caught by a cameraman, was one of ecstasy. With his grasp of the Teutonic mind, he knew that now, having acquired Autorität by legal means, he would be accepted and obeyed by the German people, and that if he continued to pay lip service to Weimar’s constitution, he could use it to destroy itself.41
He appointed Hermann Göring president of the Reichstag, and Göring moved into the Präsidentenpalast (Reichstag President’s Palace). An underground passage, part of the central heating system, connected the Präsidentenpalast and the Reichstag building. Less than a month after Hitler became chancellor—five days before a new election—an arsonist or arsonists entered the Reichstag building through this tunnel and set it ablaze. Hitler swiftly exploited the tumult; he persuaded the anxious, confused Hindenburg to sign a decree for the protection of Volk und Staat which, in effect, put the entire country under martial law. The chancellor could and did gag his political opponents, terrorize them, and silence all but the boldest, who were arrested. Over four thousand figures in public life, including Reichstag deputies, were thrown into jail. Later the hard core of his opposition were moved to Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp, and never knew freedom again.
As the election campaign approached its climax the Nazis, needing money, sought it from the titans of German industry. Göring invited them to the Präsidentenpalast—to respecters of Autorität the invitation had the force of a command—and on arrival they were seated in carefully arranged armchairs, with Gustav Krupp von Bohlen in the place of honor and four I. G. Farben directors immediately behind him. Hitler entered and faced them. “We are about to hold the last election,” he began and paused to let the full implications of that sink in. Naturally, he said, the transition to National Socialism would be smoother if the party was swept in by a landslide. Therefore, he solicited their support. In backing a dictatorship they would be backing themselves: “Private enterprise cannot be maintained in a democracy.” Using his “authority and personality,” he assured them, he would not only eliminate the Communist threat; he would abolish the trade unions and restore the Wehrmacht to its former glory. “Regardless of the outcome” at the polls, there would be “no retreat.” If he lost he would stay in office “by other means… with other weapons.” The chancellor sat down and Krupp sprang up to express “the unanimous feeling of the industrialists in support of the chancellor.” Göring reminded them of the point of the meeting. Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, the Nazi financial wizard, cried more bluntly: “And now, gentlemen, pony up!” Once again Krupp, as senior man, rose to pledge a million marks, and Schacht collected two million more from the others.42
Financed by German industrialists, Hitler led the bloodiest election campaign in European history. Every night trucks bearing squads of brown-shirted storm troopers thundered down streets and alleys all over the country, breaking down doors, dragging away their critics to be beaten and tortured. Bonfires blazed on hilltops and the storm troopers held torchlight parades, singing the party anthem. By day other party columns marched down thoroughfares, public address loudspeakers brayed martial music. Billboards were plastered with Nazi posters. Swastikas decorated telegraph poles.
It worked. The Nazis polled 17,277,180 votes; the Social Democrats 7,181,629. With the support of sympathetic nationalist deputies, Hitler could muster an absolute majority in the Reichstag. He needed more than that, however. His immediate goal was passage of an enabling act giving him dictatorial powers. Only a constitutional amendment could grant that, and amendments required two-thirds of the deputies. To the new chancellor, this presented no obvious problem; armed with his extraordinary decree, he could bar opposition deputies from entering Reichstag sessions, or, if they became unruly, arrest them.
But Hitler, though evil, was an evil genius; he recognized the necessity of mollifying the old Wilhelmine order, particularly the officer corps. If they backed him, the country would feel a sense of continuity, strengthening the impression of Nazi legitimacy. Thus he announced that the Third Reich’s first Reichstag would convene in Potsdam’s Garrison Church, the very temple of Prussianism, where the Hohenzollern sovereigns had prayed and Frederick the Great lay buried. He turned the session into an obsequious tribute to Hindenburg. André François-Poncet, the French ambassador, wrote that after this performance, “how could… the Junkers and monarchist barons… hesitate to grant him their entire confidence, to meet all his requests, to concede the full powers he claimed?”43
Two days later, in the Kroll Opera House in Berlin, the Reichstag voted 444 to 84 to give Hitler his dictatorial powers. The Enabling Act of March 23, 1933, transferred from the deputies to their chancellor the powers to make laws, control the budget, ratify treaties with foreign countries, and initial constitutional amendments. Thus ended the fourteen-year German republic. Autorität had been punctiliously observed every step along the way. “It was no victory,” wrote Spengler, “for enemies were lacking.”44
In one of his more magnanimous moments, Churchill said of the Reich’s future führer: “I admire men who stand up for their country in defeat, even though I am on the other side.” Hitler, he added, had “a perfect right to be a patriotic German if he chose.” Winston’s son, Randolph, then a journalist, had accompanied the Nazi leader during his first, peaceful 1932 campaign, and later, when the returns showed a sharp increase in Nazi voters, Randolph had sent him a telegram of congratulation. His father, however, was less enthusiastic now. In Hitler’s speeches, The Times had reported, he was demanding Wehrfreiheit (military freedom), a euphemism for German rearmament. Many MPs thought he might have a point, that Wehrfreiheit was worth discussing. In May 1932 Churchill asked them: “Do you wish for war?” Two months later he declined to join those acclaiming the Lausanne Conference, which had virtually ended reparations. How, he wondered, would Germany spend the money she owed the Allies? He felt apprehensive. Germany might rearm, he said, and cited a recent warlike statement by Hitler, “who is the moving impulse behind the German government and may be more than that soon.”45
Churchill and Hitler almost met. Although still shaky from his New York automobile accident, Winston was moving ahead in mid-1932 with the research for his biography of his great ancestor, the first Duke of Marlborough. In the summer of 1932, he and a small entourage of friends and relatives toured Marlborough’s old battlefields on the Continent. After a day on the field at Blenheim, he rested in Munich’s Regina Hotel. The Nazis were, of course, aware that he was in the country. Inevitably, the Churchill party was approached, and their envoy was skillfully chosen. Ernst (“Putzi”) Hanfstaengl was a Harvard graduate, a friend of Randolph’s, and the millionaire son of a German father and a wealthy American mother. He was also the man who had given Hitler asylum after the aborted Nazi putsch of 1923. Putzi joined the Englishmen for cocktails. After he had played some of Churchill’s favorite tunes on a lobby piano, they dined together.
The issue of German politics was raised almost immediately. Putzi offered to introduce Winston to his idol. Nothing would be easier, he said; Hitler came to the hotel every evening at five o’clock and would be delighted to meet so great a British statesman. It was all arranged, and then Churchill disarranged it. He asked Hanfstaengl: “Why is your chief so violent about the Jews? I can quite understand being angry with Jews who have done wrong or who are against the country, and I understand resisting them if they try to monopolise power in any walk of life; but what is the sense of being against a man simply because of his birth? How can any man help how he is born? Tell your boss for me that anti-Semitism may be a good starter, but it is a bad stayer.”
Putzi’s face fell. The next day he solemnly informed Winston that the meeting was off; Hitler had other plans. Since Churchill and his party remained at the Regina for a full week with no further overtures, he concluded that his disapproval of Nazi anti-Semitism had blacklisted him. So it had, but the story has an interesting envoi. Hitler had told Hanfstaengl: “In any case, what part does Churchill play? He is in the opposition and no one pays any attention to him.” Putzi shot back: “People said the same thing about you.” For this and other flippancies, Putzi, who had not only sheltered Hitler but had also given generously to his war chests, would later flee for his life, thus joining the extraordinary exodus from Germany of the blameless and the gifted. Hitler, in effect, exiled German intellectual life. During his first year in power he drove 1,600 scholars out of the country, including a quarter of the Heidelberg faculty and five Nobel laureates.46
In Parliament Churchill continued to urge revision of Versailles but vehemently opposed Wehrfreiheit, warning that accepting equality of armaments “would be almost to appoint the day for another European war—to fix it as if it were a prize-fight.” Sounding the alarm even before Hitler moved into the chancellery, he wrote in the Daily Mail on October 17, 1932, that General Schleicher had “already declared that whatever the Powers may settle, Germany will do what she thinks fit in rearmament. Very grave dangers lie along these paths, and if Great Britain… encouraged Germany in such adventures, we might in an incredibly short space of time [be] plunged into a situation of violent peril.” He told the House: “Now the demand is that Germany should be allowed to rearm. Do not delude yourselves. Do not let His Majesty’s Government believe—I am sure they do not believe—that all that Germany is asking for is equal status…. That is not what Germany is seeking. All these bands of sturdy Teutonic youths, marching through the streets and roads of Germany, with the light of desire in their eyes… are not looking for status. They are looking for weapons.”47
Perhaps nothing underscores the difference between German and British moods in the early 1930s so starkly as the political activities of their university undergraduates. In Oxford they were vowing never to fight, even in defense of England, while in Heidelberg, H. R. Knickerbocker of the New York Evening Post found, nearly three out of every four students were dues-paying Nazis. A German historian points out that Heidelberg, like Oxford, had preserved its “traditionalist, socially exclusive structure,” but that the German youths from privileged families were suppressing student groups supporting the republic in Berlin by “a powerful union of nationalist, völkisch-oriented, and above all dueling fraternities.” They campaigned strenuously against what they called the “Jewification” of the universities. Weimar’s Ministry of Culture tried to end discrimination against “non-Aryan” undergraduates, but this merely brought “a further radicalization, increasing disorders and a further growth of National Socialist propaganda.” Even “the majority of German writers,” according to Günter Grass, “made no attempt to defend the republic, while not a few of them deliberately held it up to ridicule.”48
The rightward drift in academe and the intellectual community was of profound significance. In Germany, as in England, most undergraduates came from upper-class families. Because their commitment to National Socialism was often decisive in determining parental commitment, the trend toward the hakenkreuz enlisted the lives, the fortunes, and the sacred honor of the country’s traditional ruling oligarchies, including their children, who would inherit tomorrow’s Germany.
Meantime, the Oxford Union’s resolution that it would “in no circumstances fight for King and Country” had aroused Churchill’s wrath. He called it an “abject, squalid, shameless avowal,” a “very disquieting and disgusting symptom.” Its impact abroad, he said, would be disastrous. He thought “of Germany, with its splendid clear-eyed youth marching forward… burning to suffer and die for their fatherland,” and of “Italy, with her ardent Fascisti.” He said: “One can almost feel the curl of contempt upon the lips of the manhood of all these peoples when they read this message sent out by Oxford University in the name of young England.”49
In early 1934 Oxford’s Tories invited him to speak, and he accepted—unwisely, for it was impossible for him to force entry into the locked minds of British undergraduates in the early 1930s; earlier, the Cambridge Union had voted 213 to 138 for “uncompromising” pacifism. But he couldn’t resist a fight. He agreed to appear and answer twelve prepared questions. That part of the evening went well. It was afterward, during a general discussion, that he ran into trouble. Among the five hundred students present was a German Rhodes scholar, Adolf Schlepegrell. Schlepegrell pointed out that Versailles had specified a Saar plebiscite, scheduled for 1935, to determine whether it would join France or Germany. Since the population was German, the results were a foregone conclusion. Schlepegrell suggested a generous gesture—an immediate withdrawal of French troops stationed there. Churchill, in his most combative mood, rejected the idea. Germany must abide by the letter of Versailles, he said, because she “started the war,” thereby “plunging the whole world into ruins.” The young German quickly asked: “Does Mr. Churchill believe that the German people, the men and women who live in Germany today, are responsible for the war? Would he please answer ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ ” Winston looked straight at him and replied: “Yes.” The youth bowed to him and, amid tremendous applause from his fellow students, walked out of the hall.50
Ironically, when Schlepegrell returned to Germany—where he had become a newspaper hero—the authorities found that one of his grandmothers had been Jewish, and this disqualified him from taking a bar examination. Eventually he became a naturalized British citizen and served as a political intelligence officer during World War II. So Churchill won in the end. But that sequel lay in the future, unknown, on that evening when he walked out on Winston and humiliated him in the eyes of Oxford. Nor was that all. Later in the discussion, after the German’s departure, Churchill declared British rearmament “essential for us to be safe in our island home,” and the audience, to his surprise and consternation, burst into laughter. He repeated the phrase, and the laughter grew so raucous, and so prolonged, that he could not continue.51
A half-century later their mirth seems incomprehensible. Yet how could a generation informed by Journey’s End and All Quiet on the Western Front have responded differently? They believed that Churchill was crying wolf. And they knew his alarm was groundless. As the new year arrived, a catchy tune from Walt Disney’s Three Little Pigs was on everyone’s lips:
Who’s a-fraid of the big bad wolf, big bad wolf, big bad wolf?
Who’s a-fraid of the big bad wolf? Tra la la la la!