FadeTheButcher
11-23-2004, 02:27 PM
Making Friends with Hitler
by Ian Kershaw
Penguin/ Allen Lane £20, pp488
Rich, well connected and with a fascination for politics, Lord Londonderry was that most useful of men - a perfect scapegoat. Ian Kershaw tells his story in Making Friends with Hitler
http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-images/Books/Pix/covers/2004/09/30/makingfriendswithhitler.jpg
http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/biography/0,6121,1355877,00.html
'Very agreeable... a kindly man, with a receding chin and an impressive face'. So reported Lord Londonderry after his first meeting with Hitler in 1936. Lady Londonderry, the great society hostess and fixer, saw 'a man with wonderful, far-seeing eyes... simple, dignified, humble'. Later, she wrote to him: 'You and Germany remind me of the Book of Genesis in the Bible.'
At this point, you may wonder why a good scholar like Ian Kershaw has bothered to write about such a twit as Londonderry, the sort of solemnly self-important ass my parents used to refer to as a 'stiff'. But Londonderry, if he did not achieve anything much, certainly stood for something. In the first place, he came to stand for the archetypal pro-Nazi appeaser. This was unjust, because he was never anything like a fascist. Londonderry regarded the Nazi regime as foul and suitable only for foreigners, but he did believe that Hitler had genuine grievances and should be reasoned with, not excluded.
However, during and after the war, the British needed an aristocratic scapegoat, someone who was at once appeaser and coalfield owner to symbolise the rotten old system which had brought the Depression and war. Second, Londonderry stood for a policy which did make a sort of sense. Once Hitler came to power in 1933, there were three possible British policies. These were: to negotiate with Hitler and to disarm in order to reassure him; to give him not an inch and to rearm at full speed (Churchill's line); or to open a dialogue with Germany while steadily rearming. Londonderry pursued the third option. He did so very badly, but given that his cousin Churchill's 'war policy' had almost no support at the time, it was the least worst path to take.
The Londonderrys were immensely rich, owning more than 50,000 acres, a colliery empire in the north-east of England, Mount Stewart in County Down and four other country houses, and Londonderry House on London's Park Lane.
Charles Vane-Tempest-Stewart, 7th Marquess of Londonderry, was raised to expect responsibility and office. 'Charley', as King George V called him, became a Tory MP in 1907 and fought on the Somme in 1916. His mother and wife wangled him a transfer home, but he was denied the junior ministry he expected. This was because he had failed to get Lord Curzon's footman exempted from active service.
In 1931, he was made Secretary of State for Air in the National Government. This was because Ramsay MacDonald was obsessed with Lady Londonderry, calling himself 'your attendant ghillie'. At the Disarmament Conference, Londonderry made himself unpopular by resisting pressure to reduce Britain's bomber force. At home, he was denounced as a warmonger. He made it all worse by arguing that bombers were needed to deal with rebellious wogs in Iraq or the North-West Frontier.
When Germany walked out of the conference in 1935, Londonderry asked for an increase in the RAF. The government at first refused, then suddenly changed its mind. Chamberlain (then Chancellor) took the credit for almost doubling aircraft strength. Londonderry, once blamed for loving bombers, was now blamed for failing to rearm fast enough. In March 1935, Hitler announced that he had already achieved air parity with Britain. Londonderry responded hopelessly badly in Parliament, querulously defending his own record instead of promising more aircraft. Stanley Baldwin, the new Prime Minister, sacked him. It was all very unfair.
Now began his long, fatal flirtation with Nazi Germany. He would show those middle-class second-raters what a freelance grandee could achieve. The 1936 visit to Hitler and Goering was the first of a series in which he offered himself as a mediator, as an influential friend who could convey German wishes to the highest circles in Britain.
At first, the Nazi leaders took his self-importance at face value. It was several years before they realised that nobody in Whitehall listened to Londonderry any more. The Foreign Office, which comes out of this book very well, had always known that Hitler's promises were worthless. The politicians, although they dithered, were too afraid of public opinion to follow Londonderry's calls for a 'rapprochement'.
The high-point of all these contacts was the weekend when Joachim von Ribbentrop, soon to be Nazi ambassador to London, flew in his own Junkers to Mount Stewart and joined Londonderry's house party. The diplomatic results were zero and the visit damaged Londonderry's name almost as badly as his attempt to invite Goering to the Coronation in 1937.
Kershaw, who shows genuine pity - if not quite sympathy - for his subject, points out why his campaign for friendship with Germany failed. First, Londonderry kept asking the Nazi leaders what they wanted and what the limits of their claims were. This was a non-question, because they wanted all they could get, preferably by war rather than by some international treaty.
Second, although a conventional anti-semite, he never grasped that murderous violence against Jews was central to the Nazi project, not a mere excess. Third, he could not conceive that British opinion might come to prefer an alliance with 'Bolshevik Russia' against Nazi Germany, rather than the reverse.
For a moment in 1938, Munich persuaded him that Britain had seen the light at last. Chamberlain's calculation was that Britain must negotiate with Hitler because our forces were still too weak to win a Czechoslovak war against him. But his mistake was also Londonderry's: that Hitler must prefer gains by treaty to gains by war. Within weeks, the 'Crystal Night' pogrom and then the occupation of Bohemia in March 1939 ended all Londonderry's hopes.
'Charley' was tall, thin and courteous and had a charming smile. It was not the fact of being an aristocrat in 20th-century politics which sank him; it was the fact that he was a stupid aristocrat, unable to grasp how the world had changed. The fabulous receptions at Londonderry House earned him no respect from the bourgeois politicians who thronged them. And he did not respect them, either. Privately, he thought they were all tradesmen except for cousin Winston, of course. 'I now see why I failed to understand the very second-class people I had to deal with and how glad they must have been to get me out of the way,' he reflected. But that was the only failure he ever admitted.
by Ian Kershaw
Penguin/ Allen Lane £20, pp488
Rich, well connected and with a fascination for politics, Lord Londonderry was that most useful of men - a perfect scapegoat. Ian Kershaw tells his story in Making Friends with Hitler
http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-images/Books/Pix/covers/2004/09/30/makingfriendswithhitler.jpg
http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/biography/0,6121,1355877,00.html
'Very agreeable... a kindly man, with a receding chin and an impressive face'. So reported Lord Londonderry after his first meeting with Hitler in 1936. Lady Londonderry, the great society hostess and fixer, saw 'a man with wonderful, far-seeing eyes... simple, dignified, humble'. Later, she wrote to him: 'You and Germany remind me of the Book of Genesis in the Bible.'
At this point, you may wonder why a good scholar like Ian Kershaw has bothered to write about such a twit as Londonderry, the sort of solemnly self-important ass my parents used to refer to as a 'stiff'. But Londonderry, if he did not achieve anything much, certainly stood for something. In the first place, he came to stand for the archetypal pro-Nazi appeaser. This was unjust, because he was never anything like a fascist. Londonderry regarded the Nazi regime as foul and suitable only for foreigners, but he did believe that Hitler had genuine grievances and should be reasoned with, not excluded.
However, during and after the war, the British needed an aristocratic scapegoat, someone who was at once appeaser and coalfield owner to symbolise the rotten old system which had brought the Depression and war. Second, Londonderry stood for a policy which did make a sort of sense. Once Hitler came to power in 1933, there were three possible British policies. These were: to negotiate with Hitler and to disarm in order to reassure him; to give him not an inch and to rearm at full speed (Churchill's line); or to open a dialogue with Germany while steadily rearming. Londonderry pursued the third option. He did so very badly, but given that his cousin Churchill's 'war policy' had almost no support at the time, it was the least worst path to take.
The Londonderrys were immensely rich, owning more than 50,000 acres, a colliery empire in the north-east of England, Mount Stewart in County Down and four other country houses, and Londonderry House on London's Park Lane.
Charles Vane-Tempest-Stewart, 7th Marquess of Londonderry, was raised to expect responsibility and office. 'Charley', as King George V called him, became a Tory MP in 1907 and fought on the Somme in 1916. His mother and wife wangled him a transfer home, but he was denied the junior ministry he expected. This was because he had failed to get Lord Curzon's footman exempted from active service.
In 1931, he was made Secretary of State for Air in the National Government. This was because Ramsay MacDonald was obsessed with Lady Londonderry, calling himself 'your attendant ghillie'. At the Disarmament Conference, Londonderry made himself unpopular by resisting pressure to reduce Britain's bomber force. At home, he was denounced as a warmonger. He made it all worse by arguing that bombers were needed to deal with rebellious wogs in Iraq or the North-West Frontier.
When Germany walked out of the conference in 1935, Londonderry asked for an increase in the RAF. The government at first refused, then suddenly changed its mind. Chamberlain (then Chancellor) took the credit for almost doubling aircraft strength. Londonderry, once blamed for loving bombers, was now blamed for failing to rearm fast enough. In March 1935, Hitler announced that he had already achieved air parity with Britain. Londonderry responded hopelessly badly in Parliament, querulously defending his own record instead of promising more aircraft. Stanley Baldwin, the new Prime Minister, sacked him. It was all very unfair.
Now began his long, fatal flirtation with Nazi Germany. He would show those middle-class second-raters what a freelance grandee could achieve. The 1936 visit to Hitler and Goering was the first of a series in which he offered himself as a mediator, as an influential friend who could convey German wishes to the highest circles in Britain.
At first, the Nazi leaders took his self-importance at face value. It was several years before they realised that nobody in Whitehall listened to Londonderry any more. The Foreign Office, which comes out of this book very well, had always known that Hitler's promises were worthless. The politicians, although they dithered, were too afraid of public opinion to follow Londonderry's calls for a 'rapprochement'.
The high-point of all these contacts was the weekend when Joachim von Ribbentrop, soon to be Nazi ambassador to London, flew in his own Junkers to Mount Stewart and joined Londonderry's house party. The diplomatic results were zero and the visit damaged Londonderry's name almost as badly as his attempt to invite Goering to the Coronation in 1937.
Kershaw, who shows genuine pity - if not quite sympathy - for his subject, points out why his campaign for friendship with Germany failed. First, Londonderry kept asking the Nazi leaders what they wanted and what the limits of their claims were. This was a non-question, because they wanted all they could get, preferably by war rather than by some international treaty.
Second, although a conventional anti-semite, he never grasped that murderous violence against Jews was central to the Nazi project, not a mere excess. Third, he could not conceive that British opinion might come to prefer an alliance with 'Bolshevik Russia' against Nazi Germany, rather than the reverse.
For a moment in 1938, Munich persuaded him that Britain had seen the light at last. Chamberlain's calculation was that Britain must negotiate with Hitler because our forces were still too weak to win a Czechoslovak war against him. But his mistake was also Londonderry's: that Hitler must prefer gains by treaty to gains by war. Within weeks, the 'Crystal Night' pogrom and then the occupation of Bohemia in March 1939 ended all Londonderry's hopes.
'Charley' was tall, thin and courteous and had a charming smile. It was not the fact of being an aristocrat in 20th-century politics which sank him; it was the fact that he was a stupid aristocrat, unable to grasp how the world had changed. The fabulous receptions at Londonderry House earned him no respect from the bourgeois politicians who thronged them. And he did not respect them, either. Privately, he thought they were all tradesmen except for cousin Winston, of course. 'I now see why I failed to understand the very second-class people I had to deal with and how glad they must have been to get me out of the way,' he reflected. But that was the only failure he ever admitted.