Reporting on Hitler Read online

  REPORTING ON HITLER

  Rothay Reynolds

  and the British Press

  in Nazi Germany

  WILL WAINEWRIGHT

  For BDH

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Photograph Permissions

  A Note on Newspapers

  Cast of Correspondents

  Prologue: Death of a Correspondent

  I. The Restive Curate

  II. Land of the Tsars

  III. War and MI7

  IV. Weimar Germany

  V. ‘A Mesmeric Stare’

  VI. Rise of the Nazis

  VII. Hitler Takes Over

  VIII. Nights at the Taverne

  IX. ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’

  X. A Contested Vote

  XI. Rhineland

  XII. ‘The Best Correspondent Here Left This Evening’

  XIII. Appeasement Builds

  XIV. Anschluss

  XV. ‘Quarrel in a Far-Away Country’

  XVI. Broken Glass

  XVII. When Freedom Shrieked

  XVIII. A Final Assignment

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  A Short Newspaper Guide

  List of Cited Works

  Endnotes

  Index

  Copyright

  PHOTOGRAPH PERMISSIONS

  I am grateful to the Hewson family for allowing me to reproduce the photographs of Rothay Reynolds, his parents and siblings. Also included are three photographs taken by Anthony Hewson in 1938 during his visit to Reynolds in Berlin. All photos appear by permission of the Hewson family unless the source is otherwise mentioned.

  A NOTE ON NEWSPAPERS

  “For providing information about events, none were better placed than newspaper correspondents. Wherever was excitement, there were they. They raced about the world in search of what was most urgent, most timely; interviewed the great, and witnessed the stuff of headlines. Inside information was at their disposal, and on their typewriters they played each day’s tumult. Like bloodhounds following a scent, they carried news, a ravening pack. Trains, aeroplanes, motor-cars, carried them to the scene of all disasters; war and rumours of wars set them in motion.”1

  THE THIRTIES, MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE

  The 1930s has been described as the golden age of newspapers in Great Britain. In a world before television, with radio in its infancy, newspapers were the predominant means by which everyday men and women could learn news of the outside world. Newspapers were more trusted than they are now (whether or not that trust was justified is a separate question). There were scores of them – in 1938 fifty-two morning, eighty-five evening and eighteen Sunday newspapers were printed in the United Kingdom. In deciding which newspapers to focus on, this book follows the lead of Frank Gannon, whose 1971 study The British Press and Germany, 1936–1939 prioritises what he calls the ‘major’ newspapers. These comprised seven national dailies, two important Sunday papers and the Manchester Guardian, which had an influence and reach far beyond its status as a regional paper. A short guide to the ten titles, which are listed below, follows at the end of the book.

  Daily Express

  Daily Herald

  Daily Mail

  Daily Telegraph

  Manchester Guardian

  Morning Post

  News Chronicle

  The Observer

  Sunday Times

  The Times

  CAST OF CORRESPONDENTS

  A mass of dramatis personae feature in the narrative that follows. But at the heart of this story are the unique band of men and women who, like Rothay Reynolds, were working for British newspapers in Europe. What these correspondents experienced in Berlin and other continental cities, and the resulting dispatches they sent back to London, are of prime importance. This is a short guide to their roles.

  Vernon Bartlett: News Chronicle correspondent, roving role.

  Paul Bretherton: Daily Mail correspondent, roving role.

  Harold Cardozo: Daily Mail correspondent in Paris.

  Ian Colvin: Morning Post and later News Chronicle correspondent.

  Sefton ‘Tom’ Delmer: Daily Express chief foreign correspondent.

  Norman Ebbutt: The Times correspondent in Berlin.

  Eric Gedye: Daily Telegraph correspondent in Vienna, later New York Times.

  Shiela Grant Duff: Observer correspondent during Saar plebiscite.

  Hugh Carleton Greene: Daily Telegraph assistant and later correspondent in Berlin.

  H. D. Harrison: News Chronicle correspondent in Belgrade, later Berlin.

  James Holburn: Times assistant and then correspondent in Berlin.

  Ralph Izzard: Daily Mail assistant in Berlin, later Germany bureau chief.

  Wallace King: Daily Herald correspondent in Berlin.

  Charles Lambert: Manchester Guardian correspondent in Berlin.

  Iverach McDonald: Times reporter in Berlin and elsewhere.

  Noel Monks: Daily Express journalist in Berlin and elsewhere.

  H. H. Munro (Saki): Morning Post foreign correspondent.

  Noel Panter: Daily Telegraph Munich correspondent.

  Selkirk Panton: Daily Express reporter in Vienna and Berlin.

  G. Ward Price: Daily Mail’s chief foreign correspondent.

  Douglas Reed: Times correspondent in Vienna, later joined News Chronicle.

  Rothay Reynolds: Daily News correspondent in St Petersburg, Daily Mail Berlin bureau chief, Daily Telegraph Rome correspondent.

  Karl Robson: Morning Post correspondent in Berlin.

  John Segrue: News Chronicle correspondent in Berlin.

  Philip Pembroke Stephens: Daily Express correspondent in Berlin.

  Frederick Voigt: Manchester Guardian correspondent in Berlin, then Paris, then diplomatic correspondent.

  Eustace Wareing: Daily Telegraph correspondent in Berlin.

  - PROLOGUE -

  DEATH OF A CORRESPONDENT

  Photo portrait of Rothay Reynolds, late 1930s.

  It was high summer in Jerusalem and growing uncomfortably hot for the small congregation gathered at the church. Many in attendance were English and unused to such heat, even after living in the city for several years. It was August 1940 and Britain’s League of Nations mandate to govern Palestine had been in force for two decades. Almost a year into a new war with Germany, minds drifted increasingly to friends and relatives at home. Palestine’s future remained a headache for leaders in London, who regarded it as a distraction during a tumultuous period. But the British mandate remained, forcing them to stay.

  The metal cross at the altar was too hot to touch; even the ancient stone walls had warmth. A dress code of formal wear made matters worse in the heat and the handful present shifted uneasily in their pews. Oddly, they were at the church for the funeral of a man they had met just weeks before. Among them was the chief surgeon at the government hospital, who had not been able to save him. A group of British nurses had sent a wreath of flowers.

  It was the funeral of a 67-year-old Englishman named Rothay Reynolds. He would not have come to Jerusalem had it not been for the war – one of the many individuals displaced amid the chaos. For reasons few of them knew, Reynolds had made the long and hard journey from Italy, an exhausting month-long trip that took its toll on his health. He was in a weak state when he arrived in the ancient city, and it worsened when he contracted malaria. A few days later he caught pneumonia and finally succumbed.2

  A door creaked slowly open and Reynolds’s coffin came forward, draped in the Union flag. British military police acted as pall-bearers and bore him to the front of the church for a service officiated by a Franciscan friar in a flowing brown tunic. It was a fittingly
sacred end for Reynolds who, in his younger years, had been ordained an Anglican priest before converting to Catholicism. ‘He is the sort of person who would be glad to die in Jerusalem,’ wrote a friend back in Britain. After the service he was laid to rest in the Roman Catholic cemetery on the side of Mount Zion. ‘In fact, one can’t feel sorry for him in any way; his life was so full and so good,’ the friend said. ‘One can only feel sorry that one will never see him again.’3

  But who was he? The congregation in Jerusalem had dutifully given Reynolds a fine send-off, despite not knowing much about him. It was a typically English act in honour of a man who had ventured into their quasi-outpost of the British Empire and met his end. The people who knew him, relatives and friends at home, were forced to mourn his passing from afar. The congregation guessed Reynolds was an interesting man – to travel as far as Jerusalem in the middle of a new world war was no easy feat – but they had little inkling of his startling background.

  Obituaries published in Britain gave some idea. They revealed that Reynolds was one of the best-travelled foreign correspondents of the era. As chief of the Daily Mail newspaper’s Berlin office between the wars he had known Adolf Hitler personally, and had chronicled his rise to power. He first met the Nazi leader in 1923 and interviewed him several times in the years that followed. Reynolds, who in his final days had struck the small band of mourners as an ageing, nomadic and slightly peculiar individual, was more significant than they knew.

  Old friends in the press ensured readers in Britain were made aware of his significance. The day after the funeral, six journalists, including correspondents for the Manchester Guardian and United Press of America, sent the following joint letter to the editor of the Daily Telegraph, the last paper to have employed him.

  A number of colleagues who worked abroad with the late Rothay Reynolds of your staff would like to add their tribute to the memory of a man who was for many years the doyen of the British newspapers in Berlin. We would like to lay stress upon his utter fearlessness. He never feared to stand up to Nazi officials, however much they blustered, and he always retained a suavity and dignity which almost invariably won the day. He refused to be muzzled and his direct, accurate descriptions of events in Germany must have caused the Nazis great displeasure.

  Reynolds was a man of great personal charm, widely read and deeply cultured. He was famous throughout a continent for his elegant hospitality and his kindliness. He began life abroad as a chaplain to the embassy church in St Petersburg, and although he left Holy Orders on his conversion to Roman Catholicism, he always retained something of the priestly attitude to life. Hundreds of victims of Nazi persecution and terror received from him material and moral support in an uneven fight with an evil system.4

  Other public tributes followed. ‘He was one of the few British journalists who had the foresight to interest themselves in the Nazi movement at a time when it seemed quite off the map,’ was the verdict of an obituary in The Times. ‘He never had any doubt of what Nazism meant for Europe.’5 Some saluted him in private. Frank Foley, an MI6 spy who had used his cover as the Berlin Passport Control Officer to help thousands of Jews flee Germany, wrote in sorrow to Kathleen, a sister of Reynolds. ‘I am very sorry indeed to hear of your brother’s death in Jerusalem and I know that every member of the British colony in Berlin and everyone who knew him will share in your grief.’6

  Time passed and minds shifted elsewhere. The death of a foreign correspondent was worthy of some attention, but other matters pressed; a war was on and the fate of Britain hung in the balance. Reynolds had no children to ensure the details of his remarkable life were safeguarded. In the years after his death, his three surviving siblings – Ronald, Kathleen and Marjorie – passed away. None had married or left children. The story of their brother and his role in the interwar years remained untold.

  It all began with a letter. During research into our family history, my mother had found a yellowing, type-written letter sent by Rothay Reynolds to his second-cousin, Cuthbert Reynolds. The two men had been of similar age and Rothay was godfather to Cuthbert’s eldest son, Lionel. It had been written just before Christmas in 1939, shortly ahead of his final departure from Britain.

  The letter provides a fascinating insight into Reynolds’s state of mind. He recounts how he had returned from Berlin at the start of 1939 to live in Cambridge and write a book about his time in Germany. The result was When Freedom Shrieked, which was published in November 1939 and revealed the truth about life under the Nazis. ‘It was the best contribution I could make to our cause,’ Reynolds said in the letter. He reveals his anger at the Munich Agreement of 1938, when Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s British government struck a deal with Germany that fatally undermined Czechoslovakia. He left Berlin a few months afterwards. ‘It was good to get away, for after Munich I hardly cared to look a German in the face. It was the first time that I was not proud of being an Englishman,’ Reynolds wrote.

  The letter has always fascinated me. It is a thrilling document of history and reveals in stark terms the thoughts of a man who had witnessed momentous events. Cuthbert was my great-grandfather, but he died years before I was born. My mother and I were captivated by the story of our relation, Rothay Reynolds. Why was more not known about this intriguing man, who appears to have witnessed so much and yet been forgotten?

  Again, time passed. We remained fascinated by Reynolds, but other distractions took priority. I completed my degree and began my own career in journalism. He remained at the back of my mind. Then, after a few years of reporting in London and New York, my interest in him suddenly revived. Perhaps it was the dry nature of what I was writing about – the ups and downs of the global hedge fund industry – that made me appreciate how interesting Rothay Reynolds’s career had been. He had met Hitler many times and interviewed Nazi leaders. He had fled Rome and travelled to Jerusalem during a world war. And these were just the things we knew about. What other incredible stories had he reported on? What events had he witnessed?

  My mind was set. After returning to London from New York in February 2014, I decided to pursue a story very different from my usual articles about the world of banks and high finance. I began collecting all the information I could find about Reynolds’s life. I visited Berlin, St Petersburg, Vilnius and Warsaw to retrace his footsteps in the cities in which he had worked as a foreign correspondent. I spent days in the British Library’s ‘Newsroom’ archive to read the reports he had written for the Daily Mail. I tracked down two men, both in their mid-nineties, who had known Reynolds personally. It became an obsession.

  The more I learned about Reynolds the more hooked I became on the idea of telling his story. From an early career in the church to working all over Europe as a foreign correspondent, the many adventures of Reynolds’s life became more and more clear. One part stood out from the rest. His time in Berlin, living first in the Weimar Republic and then under Nazi rule, put him at the epicentre of a unique moment in history. As one of the first foreign correspondents to interview Hitler, he had a place in history all of his own.

  The story that emerged was not a straightforward one. He had worked in Berlin for the populist Daily Mail, which had been a vocal supporter of Hitler in the 1930s. The newspaper’s owner Lord Rothermere had been a fervent admirer of the dictator, which made it almost impossible for its correspondents to report accurately on the horrors of life in Germany. Reynolds ‘struggled hard to fulfil the difficult task of being Berlin correspondent of Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail,’ according to Douglas Reed, one of his friends in the European press pack.7 But some correspondents at the Mail, including its star foreign correspondent G. Ward Price, appeared to share the proprietor’s support for Hitler. Many British newspaper owners and journalists, as well as politicians and aristocrats, supported Hitler during the 1930s. They agreed with him that Germany had been wronged by the Treaty of Versailles and supported his economic reforms. Where did Reynolds’s sympathies lie?

  The idea beh
ind this book originated as the tale of one man, but the story soon broadened in scope. Reynolds was seen as the ‘doyen’ of British newspaper reporters in Nazi Berlin, but many other talented foreign correspondents from the UK worked in similarly difficult conditions. The story of Reynolds, caught between Hitler and a press baron eager to maintain good relations with Germany, was their story too. What had started as a biography of Reynolds expanded to incorporate some of their tales and describe the conditions faced by journalists reporting on Hitler. Rivals and friends, such as Norman Ebbutt of The Times, had to contend not only with the controlling propaganda machine of Joseph Goebbels, but also the fact that many newspaper proprietors in Britain supported Hitler and happily shut their eyes to the increasingly awful truth of life in Germany. Reynolds did his best, but not until he left the Daily Mail and published When Freedom Shrieked could he reveal his true feelings about the regime.

  After Reynolds died, he left his prized collection of books to Prinknash Abbey in Gloucestershire, which houses an order of Benedictine monks with whom he felt a strong spiritual bond. He is still thought of fondly at Prinknash. The archivist there, Aelred Baker, was one of many men and women who have helped me tell this story. They are thanked in the acknowledgements section at the end of the book, though any mistakes in what follows are my responsibility. ‘He is worthy of remembrance,’ Baker wrote about Reynolds in a 2004 article. The more I read and learned about him the plainer this fact became. This book is an attempt to tell his untold story, as well as recognise the efforts of a band of journalists working in unimaginably difficult circumstances.

  - CHAPTER I -

  THE RESTIVE CURATE