Reporting on Hitler Read online

  Rothay Reynolds pictured in the 1930s smoking a cigarette, immaculately dressed as ever.

  By 1933, Reynolds was twelve years into his time as Berlin bureau chief. His young assistant Ralph Izzard, who had joined him two years earlier in 1931, would be present for nights at the Taverne. Izzard had started studying forestry at Queen’s College, Cambridge, pursuing a passion that his father, Percy Izzard, had written about at length as the Daily Mail’s agricultural and horticultural correspondent. The elder Izzard’s columns during the First World War had been read avidly by fighters at the front, who soaked up images of a bucolic England as a respite from the grim reality of life in the trenches.237 In 1931, Ralph Izzard travelled to the Black Forest in Germany to examine foresting techniques. That was the end of his studies – he used his father’s friendship with Douglas Crawford, the Mail’s foreign editor, to secure a position with the paper as an assistant in the Berlin office. He was just twenty-one. On occasions, G. Ward Price, the Mail’s roving star reporter, would also drop by, though his closeness to the emerging fascist movement in Britain did not make him popular with other correspondents at the Taverne.

  Norman Ebbutt of The Times had been a correspondent in Berlin since 1927 and his experience was much valued by Shirer and others. He had left school at the age of fifteen to travel and learn languages overseas before working for British newspapers. At the age of thirty-three, he was appointed chief correspondent for The Times in Germany. He loved the artistic culture and freedoms of the Weimar Republic and developed strong contacts within the German government and church. By the early 1930s he was, alongside Reynolds, one of the most respected British correspondents working in the country. He had spotted the Nazi menace early. Halfway through 1932 he attended a Nazi meeting addressed by Hitler, Goebbels and other Nazi leaders. He told his friend, Frederick Voigt of the Manchester Guardian, that it had made him feel ‘physically sick’.238

  Ebbutt was a well-built man prone to bouts of illness. He wore thick spectacles and would quiz his sources while sucking on a long pipe. His network was particularly deep in the German church, meaning he was well-placed to provide penetrating reports of changes affecting Christians living in Nazi Germany after Hitler took power in January 1933. Ebbutt’s reports drew praise for their seriousness and accuracy and did not pass unnoticed in Berlin, where English-speaking Germans increasingly read The Times for news of events in their own country.

  His reports on the struggle between Christians in Germany and the Nazi leadership were a cause of great displeasure to the German government. In April 1933 Leo Kennedy, a journalist at The Times, had lunch in London with Baron de Ropp, one of his German political contacts. He heard from his source that Hitler and his Nazi associates read The Times ‘minutely’ but did not let the German press feature information reported in the newspaper because it was too ‘candid’. This was welcome, if frustrating intelligence – Ebbutt and his Times colleagues in Europe were evidently doing their job if their reporting was considered too truthful for the Nazis to stomach. Kennedy was troubled, however, by the news that German newspapers were not allowed to pick up Times reports. He noted in his diary that night: ‘I must try to write just favourably enough to Hitler to get him to allow the articles to be quoted in the German press.’239

  Kennedy’s initial reaction – that content in the newspaper should be tweaked to pacify Hitler – was a harbinger of controversies over The Times’s reporting of Germany later in the decade. During the lunch meeting he also heard from de Ropp that Ebbutt had become a target for the Nazis as a result of his rapier-sharp reporting and criticism of their rule in Germany. ‘De Ropp said that the Nazis had got their knife into Ebbutt, metaphorically speaking, owing to his opposition to their movement. He said they would not dare to do him any outward visible damage – but that if they were given the chance they would certainly get him run over by a motor-car, or otherwise accidentally done in.’ Kennedy was shocked. ‘I must warn Ebbutt, but carefully, because the poor fellow is already much shaken by his experiences. (He is over here in England, resting),’ he wrote in his diary.240

  It was a stark warning that Kennedy passed onto his colleague. The Nazi reputation for brutality was already rising – Hitler’s demagoguery gave a voice and confidence to thousands of thuggish supporters. The prospect of returning to Germany, where intimidating bands of storm troopers roamed the streets, was not an appetising one for Ebbutt as he recuperated in England in the spring of 1933.

  His friend Voigt had joined the Guardian in 1919 and been sent to Berlin the following year. He had cut his teeth as a foreign correspondent under the Guardian’s famous editor C. P. Scott and remained based in Berlin throughout the Weimar era. Voigt had been resolutely critical of Hitler as the Nazis edged closer to power and moved to Paris a few weeks before Hitler was made Chancellor in January 1933. But he continued to report closely on German affairs in partnership with his replacement in Berlin, Charles Lambert. Their coverage of the Jewish Boycott and Brown Terror caused outrage among senior Nazis, who dismissed the Guardian as a ‘dirty communist rag’.241 Even in France, Voigt was not judged to be safe; there were fears the Gestapo had marked his card because of his anti-Nazi dispatches. He abruptly left France for London in December 1933 after the French Foreign Office passed on their knowledge of plans for an attack on his life.242

  For Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express, the swash-buckling Sefton ‘Tom’ Delmer had been a sensation in Berlin. But in March 1933 he too was told to move to Paris. ‘Tom, you are the best foreign correspondent this newspaper has ever had. I want to build you up as a great world reporter,’ Beaverbrook told him (according, it must be said, to Delmer’s own memoirs).243 Delmer finally left in September and was replaced in Berlin by Philip Pembroke Stephens, who would soon make his name with reports very different in nature to those sent by Delmer. Selkirk Panton and Noel Monks, a pair of Australian reporters, also sent dispatches during the 1930s for the Express, which had more foreign correspondents than any other paper at this time.

  Reynolds’s friend John Segrue reported from Berlin for the liberal News Chronicle, another paper that had a large number of reporters posted overseas. Bartlett would play a prominent role in the paper’s reporting on Germany after joining Segrue in Berlin later in 1933. Bartlett never forgot his first meeting with Hitler, an interview in the chancellery days after he took power. He found Hitler to be ‘quite amiable, but with nothing terribly impressive about him’. As with so many of Hitler’s visitors, Bartlett remarked on his eyes. ‘The only exception was his large, brown eyes – so large and so brown that one might grow lyrical about them if he were a woman.’ Hitler was ‘a little fuller in the face, and a little wider in the moustache’ than Bartlett had expected.244

  The Labour Party-supporting Daily Herald had Wallace King as its Berlin correspondent, while wizened former communist William Ewer wrote popular articles as its diplomatic correspondent in London. At the other end of the spectrum, the fervently right-wing Morning Post had Karl Robson as its man in Berlin. A close friend to Ebbutt, Robson’s articles would sting the Nazis repeatedly in the following years. In 1933, Ian Colvin, a journalist who would rise to prominence later in the decade, was working for the paper.

  The Daily Telegraph’s correspondent in Berlin between 1933 and 1938 was Eustace Wareing. A young Oxford graduate, Hugh Carleton Greene, joined him permanently as his assistant not long after finishing his degree in 1933. Noel Panter was the paper’s correspondent in Munich. The reporters of the Sunday Times and Observer, being published once a week, made less of an impact in these years – the influence of these newspapers was felt more heavily in the realms of opinion. For this reason James Garvin, the long-standing editor of The Observer, W. W. Hadley, the Sunday Times editor, and Herbert Sidebotham, who penned the latter paper’s much-read foreign affairs column ‘Scrutator’, are the most important names in relation to how those newspapers covered events in Germany.

  With all of Britain’s major newspapers having
at least one correspondent permanently based in Berlin, the reporters’ table at the Taverne was rarely quiet. Reynolds enjoyed socialising in this way. It brought back memories of times spent in the Café des Westens before the First World War. Often, however, there was unwelcome company. The Gestapo were all too aware of this meeting-place of foreign reporters, many of whom they were desperate to expel – something they would do with increasing regularity as the years went by. The harder the Gestapo men monitoring the reporters tried to lurk furtively in the shadows, the more they stood out in such a convivial environment. At other times they were merely sent to intimidate and made no effort at stealth.

  On the first night of the Jewish Boycott the group had another kind of unwelcome guest – a representative from Germany’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The representative had been sent to the Taverne to persuade the journalists to report the events in the best possible light; ‘smoothing us down,’ as Reynolds described it. In the twenty-first century, this person would have been called a spin doctor.

  ‘There are times, I think, when a correspondent should be a diplomat,’ the man said to Reynolds.

  ‘I am a simple reporter,’ Reynolds replied in non-committal fashion, not wishing to engage him.

  Reynolds later wrote: ‘His purpose was obvious and he evidently hoped that I should be induced to write a wishy-washy account of the day’s proceedings, which would not make too bad an impression on the British public.’245

  From the earliest days of the Nazi regime, attempts were made by senior members of Hitler’s team to silence the foreign press. A few days after the Reichstag fire, Göring invited the foreign newspaper journalists based in Berlin to meet him. Rumours were flying about that communist leaders were being secretly murdered by the Nazis. After annoying the reporters by organising the meeting on a Saturday – the one day off for daily newspaper journalists – Göring arrived fifteen minutes late. Though he was yet to move permanently to Berlin, Vernon Bartlett was present for the meeting. He described how Göring began an attack against the foreign press unlike any he had ever previously witnessed. He informed those present that he knew ‘not only what they sent in their telegrams and telephone messages, but also what they wrote in their private letters’. Bartlett was incensed and amazed by what he heard. ‘I found it difficult to sit through the whole address.’246 He was relieved not to be part of the group of journalists taken by Göring to see some of the more prominent communist prisoners to prove they had not been murdered.

  Such clumsy attempts at persuasion would later look the height of subtleness compared to the crude tactics deployed by Joseph Goebbels and his Ministry of Propaganda. As the 1930s went on, his grip on the domestic press in Germany tightened. Every morning and afternoon Reynolds had all the German newspapers sent to the Mail’s Berlin bureau. They were laid out for him in a row, which shortened as the years went by and various publications were banned. Goebbels was at the heart of the Nazi operation to control the press and served as Reich Minister of Propaganda throughout their time in power. He bullied German newspapers into adopting certain positions and used Der Angriff to spread anti-Semitic hatred and lies about the truth of life in Germany.

  ‘Soon one began to notice that the (German) newspapers which remained were suspiciously alike,’ Reynolds wrote. ‘Joseph Goebbels had got to work and was giving orders to editors, who did not dare disobey, because they found by experience that disobedience was punished by confiscation or by suppression, the duration of which depended on the minister’s caprice.’247 Newspapers received orders from Goebbels about which events or speeches should be given prominence in the next edition. Defying these orders could result in arrest or worse.

  ‘Identical opinions were expressed in the leading articles of newspapers that had previously been distinguished by the difference of their views. This artificial harmony was produced by summoning the leader-writers to the Propaganda Ministry to receive orders,’ Reynolds wrote.248 As early as the summer of 1933, the Telegraph’s Eric Gedye saw the reality clearly. ‘There is no significant press left in Germany except the Nazi press.’249

  It was not just in religious matters that informers feared for their lives. Sources speaking to Reynolds almost always made the same kind of request: ‘I beg you not to let anybody know that you heard this from me, or it might get around and I should be arrested.’250 It became perilous to be a journalist. Many members of the British press were expelled, whose stories we will hear. ‘The house of one of my colleagues who was subsequently arrested, was watched; it became unsafe for persons desiring to give him information,’ Reynolds recalled.251 ‘Our profession became dangerous… We were courted on the one hand and intimidated on the other.’252

  Reynolds and the other foreign correspondents did not rule out anything when it came to Goebbels. Though he could be charming on occasion, he was widely regarded as a vicious figure. ‘Dr Goebbels is a slender little man whose club foot kept him out of the war, and, by so doing, made him more violent and more bitter than he ought to be,’ Bartlett wrote.253 Goebbels’s control of the domestic press revealed not only his love of power but also his total disregard for the role of a free and impartial media.

  Soon after the Nazis came to power Goebbels moved against Edgar Ansel Mowrer, a correspondent in Berlin with the Chicago Daily News. He was one of the earliest reporters to warn of the dangers posed by Germany’s move towards extreme politics. He published Germany Puts the Clock Back around the time that Hitler took power. It was an uncompromising portrayal of Nazi aggression and malice, ‘particularly disliked on account of the frankness with which he informed the American public of ugly deeds in Germany,’ according to Reynolds.254 Once the Nazis took power their retribution was swift. The government informed Mowrer that it could not guarantee his safety, meaning that he would not be protected if attacked by storm troopers.

  Mowrer wisely decided to leave the country later in 1933, but not before further riling the German authorities. A Nazi official was sent to the train station, where a large number of foreign correspondents had gathered to bid Mowrer farewell, to check he boarded the assigned train to remove him from the country.

  ‘When are you coming back to Germany, Herr Mowrer?’ the official asked in a goading voice.

  ‘Why, when I can come back with about two million of my countrymen,’ Mowrer responded. He firmly believed that war would come and his country, the US, would be involved.255 After Berlin he had a short-lived stint in Japan running his newspaper’s Tokyo bureau before moving to Paris, from where he continued to report on Europe. Mowrer was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his early reports on Hitler. He was the first foreign correspondent expelled from Berlin but many more would follow.

  With the German press enfeebled, the foreign correspondents in Berlin became important points of contact for those wishing to know the truth about life in Germany. After losing her seat as a Labour MP in the early 1930s, the radical left-wing politician Ellen Wilkinson travelled to Germany to report for the feminist magazine Time and Tide. ‘Some tribute ought to be paid to those pressmen who, in danger of physical violence… and equally in danger of their jobs on certain papers,’ she wrote, ‘managed to get the ghastly truth over to the world.’256

  The journalists in Berlin knew there was a gulf between their perception of the Nazis and the impression held by the outside world. At a lunch at the British Embassy in April 1933, Douglas Reed, who was then a junior correspondent with The Times, was keen to make his views known to other guests including the Labour politician Hugh Dalton, who had travelled from London. Dalton found the embassy staff and its guests to be ‘all very anti-Nazi’. He recorded Reed’s view that ‘British opinion didn’t yet begin to realise the truth about the Nazis. The Nazis spoke of their “revolution,” but power was handed to them on a silver tray.’ Reed painted a grim picture. ‘Private executions were still going on and the wiping out of old grudges. In the concentration camps, just opened, things were pretty bad.’257 Reed and the other reporte
rs felt ardently they should do all they could to get the truth out before it was too late.

  The writer Storm Jameson said in her memoirs she preferred to find out from correspondents first-hand – rather than their newspapers – what was happening in Germany and Europe. ‘The after-dinner gossip of foreign correspondents is the best in the world,’ she said. ‘I was listening to Harrison Brown [a freelance correspondent], who had come back from Berlin with evidence – at that time new and barely credible – of what Hitler planned to do with the Jews living in Germany. I was still [in 1933] naive enough to think that he had only to lay it before the editor of The Times to blow away for good every hopeful illusion about the Nazi regime.’258

  Jameson later felt she could not trust her copy of The Times – or any other newspaper – to provide the real story of life in Germany. She may have guessed that correspondents had to write carefully, and sometimes misleadingly, to avoid falling foul of Goebbels and being expelled from the country. But there was more than that. As her final sentence suggests, she did not necessarily trust the editors and proprietors in London to faithfully relay what their correspondents in Berlin were reporting. The journalists meeting at the Taverne faced varying degrees of interference from their newspaper masters. The reasons for this were complex and varied from paper to paper. They formed the background to battles between reporters in Berlin and their bosses in London throughout the 1930s.

  Lord Rothermere had been running the Daily Mail for more than a decade when Hitler took power in Germany. After a series of battles in the 1920s, his firm grip on the paper was established. His time in charge following the death of his brother in 1922 had been full of controversy. In 1924 the Daily Mail had published on its front page the forged Zinoviev letter, which spread unfounded fears about the spread of communism in Britain. Rothermere did not mind – many believed the letter cost the Labour Party victory in the election held only days afterwards. His hatred of communism was all-consuming and became a key element of his attitude to foreign affairs, and support for Hitler, in the 1930s.