Authors: Jim Wilson
The flattery was still there in February 1938 at the time of the notorious Blomberg crisis, when Hitler began systematically getting rid of the ‘old guard’ of the military and aristocracy – on the whole the less fanatical leaders – and replacing them with his own appointees, in the process making himself Supreme Warlord. Rothermere’s response was to congratulate him on the ‘salutary’ changes he had made. Adulation was in evidence two months later in April 1938 in a telegram to compliment Hitler on his ‘triumph’ in the Austrian plebiscite that led to the Anschluss. ‘I beg to tender you my dear Führer my heartiest congratulations. Your star is rising higher and higher, but has not yet shone with its full effulgence.’
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In October 1938, following the capitulation of the Czechoslovakian government after the so-called Munich Agreement, Rothermere was again ladling out excessive compliments. In a telegram to Berlin he enthused: ‘Everyone in England is profoundly moved by the bloodless solution of the Czechoslovakian problem … Frederick the Great was a great popular figure in England, may not Adolf the Great become an equally popular figure.’
Churchill was not privy to the contents of the letters passing between Rothermere and Hitler; they may well have shocked him had he seen them. However, in a letter to his wife Clementine in August 1934, he echoed the sentiments Rothermere had expressed. He wrote that Rothermere wanted Britain to be strongly armed and frightfully obsequious at the same time, and that in such a way he hoped to avoid living through another war. Churchill conceded that it was a more practical attitude than that adopted by Britain’s socialist politicians, who wished to remain disarmed and at the same time be exceedingly abusive to Hitler and his Nazi colleagues. The
News Chronicle
put it rather more brutally: ‘There is nothing in modern politics to match the crude confusion of the Rothermere mentality. It blesses and encourages every swashbuckler who threatens the peace of Europe – not to mention direct British interests – and then clamours for more and more armaments with which to defend Britain presumably against his Lordship’s pet foreign bully.’ Among all leading British politicians it was really only Churchill who took note of Rothermere’s warnings. The bulk of the Establishment regarded Rothermere as a ‘wild card’ and unpredictable. He was discredited as alarmist, a collaborator, inconsistent and disloyal. Yet, as Churchill admitted, he was right in predicting many of the significant events leading up to the Second World War, for instance by campaigning for rearmament, calling for a strong air force, forecasting how rapidly the French Army would capitulate at the first sign of German might and even prophesying that Hitler would be the eventual leader of Germany, years before he achieved that office. Yet in all this Rothermere seemed oblivious to the double role his protégée Princess Stephanie was playing; oblivious too to the possibility that via the princess and her lover, Fritz Wiedemann, Hitler was making use of him.
Few in the British Establishment were prepared to give Rothermere any credit. That was clear when, in September 1938, Hitler annexed the Sudetenland and Chamberlain flourished his piece of paper recording ‘Peace for our time’. Rothermere, as perceptive as ever, cabled Churchill: ‘If it hadn’t been for you and me the country wouldn’t be nearly as well prepared for the encounter as it is today.’
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It was a truth that Churchill acknowledged in December 1939, when he wrote: ‘I know how ungrudgingly you have spent time, energy and money in your endeavours to make the nation aware of its danger and its need to re-arm. I have appreciated to the full your patriotism and your sincere desire to see Britain virile and secure.’
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At the time of Munich Rothermere’s fears spilled out in a confidential letter to Churchill. The accuracy of his prophecies now seemingly lost, he told Churchill that the Munich Agreement would last no more than nine or ten months and thereafter the British people would ‘fold’. In a struggle, he wrote, between a parliamentary system and a dictatorship, the outcome was decided before the struggle even started. Britain was passing into the twilight, he gloomily forecast. ‘A moribund people with a moribund government cannot stand up to the perils of these times.’
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It was one prophesy he got wrong, but he never lived long enough to see the tide of war change.
There were others in high places who shared many, if not all, of Rothermere’s views. One such figure was the 11th Marquess of Lothian, whose family estate was at Blickling in North Norfolk, close to Rothermere’s country seat at Stody. During the Great War Lothian had served as private secretary to Prime Minister Lloyd George, and in the opening two years of the 1930s he had held the posts of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and Under-Secretary for India in the National Government. Later, he was a prominent spokesman for the Liberal Party in the House of Lords. When Hitler came to power, Lothian argued that by winning German co-operation and allowing Germany to regain some of the territory it had lost as a result of the Treaty of Versailles, Britain would have the best chance of not only avoiding another bitter conflict, but also of preserving its empire. He persisted in his policy of friendship with Hitler and his fellow Nazis almost as long as Rothermere did.
In July 1938 Lord Lothian hosted a four-day gathering of German visitors, including a number of dedicated Nazis from the Deutsche Gruppe, at his stately home, the magnificent and picturesque Jacobean Blickling Hall. During a lavish weekend of hospitality, his guests, who included a representative of the Reich Propaganda Ministry, discussed ways of furthering Anglo-German relations with a British group who were mostly very sympathetic to the new Germany. Those present included several who Princess Stephanie had befriended. Among them were Lord Astor, owner of the
Observer
newspaper; Sir Thomas Inskip; and Arnold Toynbee, who had just returned from a meeting with Hitler in Berlin. Another was the influential editor of
The Times
, Geoffrey Dawson. The Blickling weekend resulted in a document entitled ‘How to deal with Hitler’, which painted the Nazi leader as a reasonable statesman. The outcomes from the weekend debate were transmitted next day to the government. Lothian, like others, was convinced the best hope for a peaceful Europe and a sound future for the British Empire was the removal of Germany’s sense of grievance and injustice. In his pursuit of this cause he was prepared to turn a blind eye to the brutal excesses of the Nazi regime, even as late as a few months before war broke out. Hitler had been told by his London ambassador that Lothian was ‘without doubt the most important non-official Englishman who has so far asked to be received by the Chancellor’.
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When the two met face to face for a two-and-a-half-hour audience on 29 January 1935, Hitler emphatically ruled out using force against Poland, France, the Low Countries and Austria, and emphasised his determination not to provoke a war. Lothian, like so many others, took it all at face value and put forward his assessment of what the Führer had told him in a series of letters to
The Times
. Two years later, in 1937, Lothian made another trip to meet Hitler. This time the
Observer
printed an article lauding the success of Lothian’s mission and crediting Hitler as being ‘genuinely anxious for an understanding with the British Empire’.
Unlike Rothermere, Lothian’s reputation hardly suffered from his overtures to the Nazis, despite the fact that the American ambassador to Berlin, William Dodd, had referred to Lothian as ‘more Fascist than any other Englishman I have met’.
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Ironically, Lothian was appointed British ambassador to Washington from 1939–40, a key position when Britain stood alone and Churchill was desperate to gain American support, if not as a participant, then as a generous supplier of war machinery. In September 1940, little more than two years after hosting that get-together of pro-Nazi guests at his Norfolk stately home, Lothian was responsible for the negotiations with President Roosevelt to conclude a crucial agreement for the still neutral United States to transfer fifty destroyers to Britain in exchange for naval and air bases in British territories in the Atlantic. Shortly after achieving that agreement, Lothian fell ill and died. Meanwhile, Blickling Hall, where the infamous 1938 pro-Nazi weekend was held, became the officers’ mess of nearby RAF Oulton.
The Nazis had a misplaced belief that almost any Englishman with an impressive title and friends within the British Establishment could exercise influence on British foreign policy, hence their keenness to court members of the aristocracy sympathetic to their cause. It is clear from the MI5 documents that Princess Stephanie was actively recruiting these British aristocrats in order to promote Nazi sympathies.
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Indeed, it appears one of her major tasks on behalf of the Nazi leadership was to canvass and infiltrate pro-Nazi views into British society. It was a mission in which she excelled – her title gained her access; her personality and flirtatious charm provided an effective means of persuasion. In the notes she later wrote for her unpublished memoirs, she lists many names of prominent Britons whom she considered either friends or close acquaintances. They go to the very top of British society. Her list is headed by the Prince of Wales and Wallis Simpson, and includes Lady Mendl, Lady Cunard, Lord and Lady Londonderry, Lady Oxford, Lord Brocket, Lord Carisbrooke, Lord Rothschild, the Aga Khan and Dawson, editor of
The Times
.
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It is reasonable to speculate she was at the notorious gathering at Blickling Hall herself, given the closeness of Blickling to Rothermere’s country residence, Stody Lodge. The opportunity to promote further pro-German propaganda through the influential pages of
The Times
, which rightly or wrongly was considered by foreigners as the authentic voice of the British government, would have been too good an opportunity to miss.
Rothermere and Lothian were just two from the ranks of the Establishment who fell for these pro-Nazi overtures. The Duke of Westminster, who Princess Stephanie had befriended, having met him in France some years before, was another. The duke even took her on holiday to Scotland and it is clear that for a time romance blossomed between them. Two other prominent Nazi supporters were the Marquess and Marchioness of Londonderry, members of one of Britain’s grandest and wealthiest aristocratic families, and owners of more than 50,000 acres. It is well documented, both in the notes kept by British intelligence and in her own personal notes, that the Londonderrys were close friends of the princess.
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Indeed, her MI5 file describes Lady Londonderry as ‘among her most intimate friends in England’. Londonderry, a cousin of Churchill, had, like Rothermere, been Secretary of State for Air. He was a flying enthusiast and believed passionately in the potential of aircraft in modern warfare. He held the ministerial post at the Air Ministry from 1931 until 1935. But in the second half of the 1930s, when to his bitter disappointment he lost high office, Londonderry and his wife became strong supporters of Nazi Germany. During his time in government, echoing Rothermere and Churchill, Londonderry pressed hard to increase the RAF’s capacity to offer a strong and reliable defence. However, he was constrained by budgetary problems and fears of stimulating a new arms race when Britain was publicly pressing for a policy of disarmament in Europe. He was well aware that Britain was falling dangerously behind other countries, particularly Germany, in the numbers of squadrons at its disposal, but he faced difficulties in making headway because of strongly held policies against aggressive rearmament elsewhere in government.
When his term in office ended in June 1935 he was unfairly discredited and felt, with some justification, that he had been made a scapegoat for the ineffective policies of the National Government. His time as Secretary of State for Air produced some real and lasting achievements for which he was never really acknowledged, probably because of his later relationship with the Nazis. His strong support of the design of modern fighter aircraft gave the initial push that resulted in the two famous aircraft which were the saviours of the Battle of Britain: the Spitfire and Hurricane. The beginnings of research into radar – the invention which together with the iconic fighters played such a massive part in the air defence of Britain – dated to his period in office, as did the prototypes of the early generation of the RAF’s Second World War bombers – the Wellington, Hampden and Blenheim. The latter, of course, was developed from the prototype that Rothermere personally commissioned and paid for.
Within months of losing his post at the Air Ministry, Londonderry began to emerge as a strong champion of Germany. It was his fervent, if misguided, belief that a personal mission to meet Hitler and his fellow Nazis might lead to an arrangement with Germany. Londonderry was particularly keen to meet his erstwhile opposite number, Goering. In January and February 1936 Londonderry combined his first visit to meet the Nazi leadership with a trip to the Winter Olympics in Bavaria. Goering was more than happy to facilitate the trip, even sending a Junkers JU52 to Croydon to fly Londonderry and his wife to Berlin. The Nazi hierarchy did everything possible to impress their new admirers, showing them Luftwaffe installations and airfields, and introducing them to key players in the Third Reich. The day after their arrival they were invited to witness a huge procession of thousands of storm troopers gathered in the Wilhelmstrasse to mark the third anniversary of Hitler’s rise to power. The following day they were guests of Goering at Carinhall, his vast hunting lodge and estate north of Berlin. Goering was an enthusiastic hunter and conservationist. He had introduced elk, bison and wild horses to his estate, and the sport there for any keen hunter was outstanding; far removed from the traditional shooting of game on the landed estates in Britain. In extensive talks, which followed a hunting expedition, Goering advocated a bilateral agreement between Germany and Britain, implying an Anglo-German air pact. On 4 February came the high point for the British aristocrat – a two-hour audience with Hitler in the Reich Chancellery followed by a reception and lunch hosted by German Foreign Minister Baron von Neurath. Two days later Lord and Lady Londonderry were flown in Goering’s personal plane to Berchtesgaden to visit Goering’s mountain retreat, before moving on to the Winter Olympics.