Reporting on Hitler Read online

The thuggish behaviour of Nazi supporters outside the Kroll Opera House was one part of the ‘Brown Terror’ that swept the country in the weeks before and after the March election. Hitler’s supporters felt emboldened by his ascent to the chancellorship and vindicated by his victory in the subsequent election. ‘For the terror as a whole the regime is responsible,’ Frederick Voigt reported in the Guardian. ‘Although it has ebbed it has not ceased. There are continual raids by Brown Shirts; there were at least two in the “Norden” quarter of Berlin on Tuesday. Arrests are being made the whole time. Prisoners are continually being shot “while trying to escape,” and dead bodies are continually being found.’213 This report was published on the very day the Enabling Act was passed. It was an early example of the Guardian’s probing and revealing reports on Germany – reports that would make life dangerous for its correspondents based there in the 1930s.

  During the first two months of Hitler’s chancellorship Reynolds realised just how difficult his employer’s politics would make his job. He was well aware of Lord Rothermere’s pre-existing admiration for Hitler, which had coloured the Daily Mail’s coverage of Germany since the Nazi breakthrough in 1930. But now that Hitler was actually in power, Reynolds expected Rothermere to demand a more critical, questioning approach. This instruction was not forthcoming and the newspaper continued to take a firmly pro-Nazi line.

  A first taste of this came when the Mail reported on the passing of the Enabling Act. While the Mail did not mention the aggressive atmosphere, which made opposition to Hitler virtually impossible, the Express reported on the storm troopers shouting warnings at politicians. ‘Chancellor Makes Listeners Tremble While Storm Troops Shout Threats Through Windows’ ran its headline. Reynolds had witnessed it – as his later account in When Freedom Shrieked proves – but the Mail’s coverage fell short. ‘The Express has caught the menace of the Nazi regime, while the Mail has deliberately chosen to ignore it,’ was the verdict of BBC journalist John Simpson in his later history.214 He claims Lord Rothermere was to blame. ‘The Express presented a far more realistic picture of the Nazis than the Mail did, because it was less cluttered with its proprietor’s preconceptions.’

  Reynolds’s experience was a sign of things to come. Hitler’s early treatment of the Jews presented a stark example of how Rothermere would order his paper to cover unfolding events in Germany. It is difficult to determine how much of what appeared in the Mail stemmed from dispatches sent by correspondents, as opposed to subsequent interference by Rothermere and his editors in the London newsroom. But during the Jewish Boycott came clear evidence of proprietorial interference in London.

  With other journalists in Berlin, Reynolds had been reporting on the mounting tension between the Nazi authorities and the country’s Jewish population. Nazi supporters were further emboldened by the passage of the Enabling Act and the country, it seemed, was now theirs to dominate. The ‘Brown Terror’ focused increasingly on Germany’s Jewish population, a minority that represented about 1 per cent of the country. Storm troopers were sent to intimidate Jewish shop-owners and businesses, and to dissuade Germans from going inside. The violence towards Jews led to an international outcry. Hitler and his associates purported to be beyond angry at what they saw as ‘propaganda’ spread by Jews abroad. They accused ‘international Jewry’ of spreading deliberate lies about the Nazi regime to damage Germany. Increasingly vehement language was used. The great physicist Albert Einstein, who happened to be a Jew, had left Germany in December 1932 after Nazi intimidation. In March 1933 Reynolds asked one of Hitler’s associates if he would be allowed to return. ‘What would England do to British subjects who abused their country abroad?’ was the cold reply.215

  The Nazi response to what they called ‘atrocity propaganda’ – rather than plain truth – was their boycott of Jewish businesses in Germany. It would begin on Saturday 1 April. On 27 March the Daily Mail printed a report by Reynolds carrying an official statement. ‘All the reports of the mishandling of Jews are barefaced lies,’ said Hitler’s spokesman. Reynolds’s report also carried comments from Hermann Göring, who had hosted a group of foreign correspondents at his official residence. ‘The government is shocked, indignant and indeed speechless at the reports which have been written abroad about Jews in Germany,’ he said.

  Göring then offered a statement that is chilling in its detail. He denied authorising any violence, but revealed a familiarity with methods of torture. ‘There is not a man in Germany whose finger nail has been hacked off or who has had the lobe of his ear pinched off, and all have kept their sight.’216 The words of Göring and Hitler’s spokesman are reported without judgement by Reynolds. Objective journalism, perhaps, but other newspapers printed reports that gave a fuller idea of what was going on. The Manchester Guardian reported on 1 April from Dusseldorf that ‘all the leading Jews of the city have been deprived of their passports, thus preventing them from leaving the country’. German newspapers were being ordered not to employ any Jews. Non-Jewish employees of Jewish firms were being encouraged to ask for two months of wages in advance. ‘Black placards with yellow spots’ were to be placed on all Jewish shops during the boycott. It was a blunt and revealing report by the Guardian that gave no prominence to the meaningless Nazi platitudes and excuses.217

  The easy ride given to Hitler on the Jewish question by the Daily Mail gives away the malign influence of Rothermere. A few days later, Reynolds reported on Hitler’s response to the boycott. Yet his article, which appeared on 3 April, headlined ‘Germany’s Jewish Boycott’, is not exactly what he had filed to his editor in London. Goebbels had authored a violent diatribe against the Jews in Der Angriff, the newspaper he founded in 1927 to spread his hateful Nazi messages. Reynolds quoted from the article in his report on the boycott and ended by saying: ‘The Angriff says: The boycott was carried out in a way worthy of the German people.’ Reynolds said he had written this as ‘an ironical end’ to his dispatch, intended to give some idea of the ridiculous pitch of the comments issued by Nazi officialdom.

  It did not appear that way in the paper. The words ‘The Angriff says’ were omitted, totally altering the meaning of the piece. ‘The statement appeared as my considered opinion,’ Reynolds later wrote.218 He did not directly accuse Lord Rothermere or any other individual at the Daily Mail of doctoring his copy, but the change in meaning was such that it led Der Angriff to subsequently report: ‘The Berlin correspondent of the Daily Mail says that the boycott was carried out in a way worthy of the German people.’

  It was a clear early example of the restrictions Reynolds faced working for the Daily Mail in Berlin. He was forced to walk the tightrope between Rothermere’s overbearing influence and his own journalistic integrity. In many cases, as with his reporting of the Jewish Boycott, this was impossible and he fell short. Only later was he able to reveal his true thoughts about Hitler’s early attacks on Germany’s Jewish population. ‘I found myself in a mood of extreme depression, to which my nature does not incline me,’ he wrote in 1939. ‘I was beset by a sickening feeling, as if I had been in contact with something unclean from which I must be purged.’219

  Reynolds’s reporting peers in Germany shared his sentiment. Bartlett was in Berlin to monitor the boycott and was moved to tears. ‘If its object was to preach hatred, it certainly succeeded,’ he wrote. ‘I came back to my hotel so overcome with shame that I almost wept.’220 Their humanity meant he and other correspondents could not help but intervene in what was going on. Bartlett was almost beaten up after going to the defence of a Jewish flower-seller who was being rebuked by half a dozen storm troopers for not closing her shop. They turned on him, and calmed only when he showed them his official papers. ‘My cowardice came back and I hurriedly produced my passport to prove I was a foreigner.’221

  Readers in Britain had to look to the Manchester Guardian and elsewhere for the truth of the boycott. The Mirror also emerges with credit for printing a critical telegram from Commander Oliver Locker-Lampson, a Conservative
MP and supporter of Hitler: ‘The decision to discriminate against the German Jews has had a most damaging effect upon the good feeling for Germany which was growing stronger… This action against the Jews is making the work of myself and other friends of Germany almost impossible.’222 Germany’s treatment of the Jews drew public opprobrium in Britain. In May 1933, Dr Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler’s minister for Germans abroad, laid a wreath at the foot of the Cenotaph on Whitehall, in honour of the Great War dead. It was removed in protest and thrown into the Thames.

  Eric Gedye, who had a long career reporting in Vienna for the Daily Telegraph, observed in 1933 that masses of ordinary Germans were willing to shut their eyes to the dangers facing Jews and socialists because of their belief that Hitler could unify and strengthen the country. He described the mood he encountered: ‘If a few Jews and socialists have lost their jobs and had their ears boxed, are you really going to concentrate on abusing us for these unimportant incidents and overlook the glorious national awakening?’ Yet as early as 1933 Gedye saw that the abuse accompanying Hitler’s rise to power went beyond boxed ears. In an eyewitness piece for a magazine he described the ‘brutal beatings, killings, suicides of dismissed intellectuals, the lacerated backs, cripplings and ruined existences which have marked the triumph of Hitlerism’.223

  In a book published before he started at the News Chronicle, Bartlett summed up the conflicted emotions of many Germans and overseas observers. A general sense of economic optimism competed with unease about the increasing Nazi persecution of Jews and other minorities. ‘Some are so impressed by the enthusiasm that is everywhere evident that they look upon the ill treatment of Jews, social-democrats, communists, and pacifists as an inevitable, if unpleasant, feature of a revolution,’ he wrote. ‘Others are so revolted by accounts of this ill treatment, and so alarmed by photographs of uniformed storm troops marching in excellent military formations past some Nazi leader, that they believe war to be the great ambition of the National Socialist movement.’224

  Most British journalists working in central Europe in 1933, including Gedye and Bartlett, were clear in their conclusions and perceived Hitler as a tyrant in the making. Bartlett did not think that Hitler wanted war immediately, but believed he may well do in the future. Gedye was alert to the hypocrisy at the heart of National Socialism from the start. He took pleasure in exposing it. ‘This movement, which claims to be the very essence of Germanism, has so far grown great by studying and copying other countries. From Sanskrit comes its Swastika badge, from Imperial Rome its fascist salute, from Mussolini its dosing of its victims with Castor oil.’225

  This analysis was clear-eyed and not borne of the virulent anti-German sentiment that coloured the reports of some correspondents. Gedye had lived for seven years in the occupied German territory of the Ruhr after the war. While reporting for The Times on developments in that region and the Rhineland, he had pointed out that Germany’s punishment after the war may be storing trouble for the future. ‘I did what was possible in that capacity to make people at home realise the intolerable – and from the standpoint of British self-interest, dangerous – treatment to which a great nation of sixty millions was being daily subjected.’226 He saw the argument from all sides, but knew there was no justification for Hitler’s brutality.

  Some Britons outside the press pack sounded early warnings in 1933. The ambassador in Berlin, Sir Horace Rumbold, was a grizzled veteran of Britain’s diplomatic service. Eton-educated, in common with so many members of the country’s ruling elite, he had enjoyed a long and brilliant career, working across the world in postings ranging from Cairo to Tehran, Vienna to Tokyo. A smartly turned-out man with a pale face and neat moustache, Rumbold had started his Berlin posting late in the 1920s. He had hoped to see Brüning succeed, believing his success to be the best way to keep extremists in Germany at bay. He was approaching retirement age when Hitler came to power in 1933 and immediately recognised the threat posed by the country’s new leader and his supporters.

  Two months after Hitler took the chancellorship he made his views clear in a letter to Lord Vansittart, the most senior civil servant in the Foreign Office. Hitler’s government was characterised by ‘a mean spirit of revenge, a tendency to brutality, and a noisy and irresponsible jingoism,’ Rumbold wrote. The rise of the Nazis had led many writers, artists and political activists to leave Germany, creating a ‘kind of vacuum,’ he said. ‘Whatever may have been the shortcomings of the democratic parties, they number among their following the intellectual life of the capital and nearly all that was original and stimulating in arts and letters.’227

  Rumbold had read Mein Kampf and identified the threat posed to Germany’s Jewish population. Many at this early stage had not read Hitler’s tome of political hate, even so-called experts on Germany such as the historian John Wheeler-Bennett.228 Rumbold did not believe foreign opinion overseas had quite realised the extent of the hatred towards Jews borne by Hitler and the Nazis. He presciently expected Hitler to take further action, beyond the Jewish Boycott, and in time thought he could even try to expel Jews from Germany.

  Why did Rumbold think this? He had seen at close hand the measures Hitler was imposing on Jews and others. As early as April 1933 he was warning senior government figures in London about the establishment of concentration camps. These were not yet the factories of genocide they would become in wartime, but just a few months into Hitler’s chancellorship he was using them as centres for Jewish oppression. During one of Rumbold’s meetings with Hitler in May 1933, he was on the receiving end of a tirade about the Jews and their supposed fermentation of anti-German sentiment abroad. ‘It would be a mistake to believe that anti-Semitism was the policy of his wilder men whom he has difficulty controlling,’ Rumbold concluded.229 He had done his research. After taking the effort to read Mein Kampf, he knew the policy stemmed from Hitler directly.

  In June the ambassador reached the age of retirement and was forced to leave Berlin. He was perceptive to the end, describing Hitler, Göring and Goebbels as three ‘notoriously pathological cases’ in his last dispatch to London. ‘One looks in vain for any men of real worth’ among the Nazi leadership, he wrote.230 Few others had yet reached this conclusion. In an unfortunate twist it was Lord Vansittart, the senior British diplomat who was another early and persistent critic of Hitler, who forced Rumbold to leave his post. He was in charge of enforcing the retirement rules and did so punctiliously, despite the quality of Rumbold’s work in Berlin. Even Vansittart’s admiring biographer, the journalist Ian Colvin, recognised this as a mistake. ‘Every rule ought to have its exceptions,’ he wrote in a rare piece of criticism in Vansittart in Office.231

  The diplomat partly made up for this lapse by continuing the often lonely work of warning against Hitler in the years to come. Vansittart never held the view, popular across London from the clubs of Mayfair to the boardrooms of the City, that communist Russia posed a bigger threat than fascist Germany. ‘Hitlerism is exceedingly dangerous,’ he wrote in a pointed memo to Sir John Simon, the Foreign Secretary, in 1933.

  Russia has been too incompetent a country to be really dangerous, even under Bolshevism. But Germany is an exceedingly competent country, and she is visibly being prepared to external aggression. I do not think that anything but evil and danger for the rest of the world can come out of Hitlerism.232

  In a separate memo that year Vansittart said that Hitler had a psychological obsession with Austria and predicted he would attempt to annex the country.

  Another man who was early in identifying the threat posed by Hitler was Brigadier Arthur Temperley, Britain’s military representative at the League of Nations. He did not mince his words in a memorandum which warned that Hitler was like a mad dog that must be locked up or destroyed. Germany ‘is powerless before the French army and our fleet,’ he wrote. ‘Hitler, for all his bombast, must give way.’ This was forwarded to the Cabinet by Vansittart in 1933 but it had no impact. MacDonald and his government were in no mood to take pre-em
ptive action against Hitler.233 Later the Daily Telegraph would make use of Temperley’s perceptive qualities in its anti-appeasement coverage.

  Meanwhile in Berlin, Reynolds found an atmosphere of fear and suspicion taking hold. One day he had a clergyman friend to visit. ‘You have a telephone there,’ his guest exclaimed, before throwing his coat over it. ‘They may have put a microphone in it, and the Secret Service may be listening to our conversation.’234 That was as early as 1933. But most Germans were oblivious to the fate awaiting their country – many thought they would be able to give Hitler an opportunity, and eject him if he failed. ‘We shall give them a chance, and if we do not like them they will have to go,’ was the general mood Reynolds encountered.235 It was to prove a naive hope.

  - CHAPTER VIII -

  NIGHTS AT THE TAVERNE

  Reynolds was part of a close-knit community of foreign correspondents who met most nights to share experiences and compare findings. Their regular haunt was the Taverne, an Italian restaurant in the middle of Berlin, where British, French and American correspondents had a Stammtisch, a table permanently reserved for them in the corner. It was run by a fat German man named Willy Lehman and his slim Belgian wife, and was a haven for the foreign reporters during the 1930s as the Nazi oppression grew.

  Most of the reporters working in Berlin shared Gedye and Bartlett’s critical attitude towards Hitler. One of the correspondents Reynolds mixed with was William Shirer, the American broadcast journalist whose reports of life in Nazi Germany and 1930s Europe had huge audiences in the US. Shirer recorded details of the era in his famous diaries of the pre-war years. The Taverne ‘has become an institution for the British and American correspondents here, helping us to retain some sanity and affording an opportunity to get together informally and talk shop – without which no foreign correspondent could long live,’ he wrote. The correspondents relished the chance to gossip and hatch plans – the table was usually full from about 10 p.m. until three or four in the morning.236