Reporting on Hitler Page 6

  Reynolds was hit harder by a death in the trenches. He was more than a year in to his work with MI7 when, in November 1916, he received terrible news from the front. Munro had suffered an arduous two years since enlisting in August 1914. He had refused a commission as an officer and served as a corporal and later lance sergeant. In the final months of 1916 he had contracted malaria. On 11 November, after hearing an offensive was imminent, he felt the lure of battle and discharged himself from hospital. Ancre was the scene for the last big British offensive of the Somme. Three days after leaving hospital Munro was in the trenches in the early hours. A troop nearby lit a cigarette, revealing their position. ‘Put that bloody cigarette out!’ barked Munro. His own head was exposed above the trench-line and seconds later a sniper’s bullet found its target. In an instant, Reynolds had lost one of his closest friends. He became increasingly depressed working for MI7 during the remainder of the war. He continued to monitor foreign newspapers and helped where he could as Britain and her allies moved towards victory – but he struggled to come to terms with the death of Munro.

  - CHAPTER IV -

  WEIMAR GERMANY

  Reynolds was growing restive in London, and the signing of the Armistice in November 1918 represented an opportunity for him to travel again. MI7 was disbanded that month and his time working in the secret war effort was over. The conflict had clipped his wings, trapping him on the British Isles when his natural instinct was now to venture overseas. Aside from his own inclination to travel, he had a pressing need for fresh perspectives to sustain his career in journalism. With his lecturing, books and wartime articles on Russia, he had milked his unique experience of that country dry. Of the Bolsheviks he knew little. The post-war environment represented a changed world and Reynolds needed new experiences to match.

  One destination stood out above the rest: Poland. Reynolds loved the country, its people and its Catholic nature. The country had suffered at German hands in the war, but its conclusion had led to the long-awaited return of a united Poland at the heart of a restored and protected Mitteleuropa, or central Europe. It was a glorious rebirth for the country and Reynolds wanted to witness it first-hand.

  He went to Warsaw to file reports for his old paper, the Daily News, and spent a lot of time touring through Poland and neighbouring countries to view the after-effects of war. In Vienna he noticed how faces were cadaverous after years of undernourishment. ‘They looked as if they were made of wax,’ he wrote.96 He gave tins of corned beef to servants, who reacted ‘as if they had been presented with caskets of jewels’.97 Sardines and lemons, brought in by the Italians, appeared to be the only foodstuff available in quantity in the Austrian capital.

  It was a similar story in Poland. He gave half a pound of chocolate to a friend in Warsaw and was incredulous when she ate it all at one sitting. ‘She had not tasted chocolate for four years,’ her husband told Reynolds afterwards.98 In the years after the war there remained substantial resentment in Poland at Germany’s actions during the fighting. Reynolds was particularly incensed by stories of how Polish church-bells had been stolen by Germany. He wrote an account of arriving in Warsaw before the war, alone and tired, and desiring to attend a church service on a Sunday morning: ‘All the bells of all the churches were calling men to prayer. I went into the cathedral where the men were listening to a sermon,’ he wrote. ‘Presently the choir began to sing the creed in the mother-tongue of Europe to music I had heard in England and in France, and I did not feel lonely any more.’

  He compared this to when he returned to Warsaw after the Armistice. The city was silent on Sunday morning. No bells rang out. He asked a bystander what had happened to them.

  ‘The Germans took them away,’ was the reply.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To make them into cannon.’99

  This period travelling made a strong impression on Reynolds. In the years that followed, a strong anti-German feeling emerged in his writing. His admiration for the Poles and love of their culture meant he felt their troubles all the more deeply. After working for a propaganda unit producing material that was not always factual, it was quite something to see and hear first-hand what the ‘evil Hun’ had really been capable of during the war.

  At this time three of Reynolds’s four siblings were back in Britain. His youngest brother Ronald had returned abruptly from tutoring in Russia because of the Bolshevik Revolution, joining his two sisters. The middle brother, Leslie, was in Rome, where he had been studying at Beda College in preparation for the Catholic priesthood. But his health was failing.

  Kathleen was the second of five Reynolds children.

  The middle child Leslie was intensely religious, like all the Reynolds children, and was studying for the Catholic priesthood in Rome when he died in 1919.

  Ronald was the youngest son and later worked as a tutor in pre-revolutionary Russia, following Rothay to the country.

  Marjorie (second from left) was the youngest child. During the First World War she helped care for blinded soldiers at St Dunstan’s (the charity is now called Blind Veterans UK).

  He had been a sickly man for several years and died in the eternal city in May 1919, six months after the end of the war. His death was marked by a small notice in the Catholic newspaper The Tablet.100

  Just as Reynolds’s knowledge of Russia proved a useful asset professionally, his newly inflamed anti-German sentiment was not without its advantages. Soon after his travels in Europe, Reynolds was seeking the stability of a permanent job. Making use of the contacts he had made during the war, he got in touch with Lord Northcliffe. The ageing press baron had an interesting offer for him: to head up an office for the Daily Mail in the German capital. Reynolds’s age, experience and fluency in the language made him an attractive prospect for the paper, although his liberal politics and sophisticated interests jarred with its right-wing, populist outlook. That said, his time travelling in Poland meant he had few qualms about writing for a newspaper that, in the immediate aftermath of war, was no friend to Germany.

  For Reynolds the appeal of regular, paid work as a foreign correspondent was too great to turn down and he gladly accepted a job with the third newspaper of his career. There was just one problem. The Daily Mail did not have permission from the German authorities to have a correspondent living in Berlin. Reynolds thought he had little chance of even getting permission to enter the country, let alone stay there. Lord Northcliffe and his newspapers were hated in Berlin because of their role in Britain’s wartime propaganda campaign. Lord Northcliffe, however, did not expect a problem. ‘They may turn you out of Berlin,’ he flippantly remarked to Reynolds shortly before he left. ‘But I hardly think they will dare.’101

  It was March 1921. Reynolds went first to Cologne, in the west of the country and still under British occupation three years after the end of the war. It was part of the Rhineland region between Germany and France, which Germany had been required to demilitarise under the Treaty of Versailles. Reynolds heard tales from British soldiers of their callous treatment at German hands while being held as prisoners of war. The first article in the Daily Mail to carry his byline, sent from Cologne, had a suitably uncompromising headline: ‘What No Hun Can Understand.’ Reynolds reported on German surprise at the manner in which British officers walked around the city. They were baffled that leading members of the winning army did not demand any signs of deference from the people of Cologne. Reynolds remarked on how polite the soldiers were to everybody. He suspected that the Germans thought the British had short memories and were forgetting about the war. Yet their subsequent invitations to dinner and dances were refused by the British occupiers. Why the apparently contradictory approach? ‘It is our duty to forgive our enemies,’ and treat them well, Reynolds writes. But ‘thank heaven, we are not commanded to make them our bosom friends!’102

  In Cologne he received permission to venture deeper into the country. His journey was smoother than expected, and Reynolds soon arrived in a Berlin he did not re
cognise. The city seemed unclean, shabby and grey and there was no sign of any military, whose uniforms had brought some colour to the streets when Reynolds had been there before the war. The people, however, struck him as cheerful. ‘I found everywhere not merely courtesy, but friendliness and cordiality. It was as if the nation had chosen to forget that there had been a war and that Germans and English had ever been enemies.’103

  Reynolds had made it to Berlin, but needed permission to stay. He went to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for an appointment with the relevant official, Dr Muellerheimer. It did not start well. The German was surprised to find a representative of Lord Northcliffe in Berlin and asked how he had made it so far. Reynolds gave an evasive reply, but need not have worried. Dr Muellerheimer, who went on to become a friend, decided not to make an issue of it and allowed Reynolds to stay. The new unspoken German policy of cordiality had worked in his favour.

  Soon after his arrival Reynolds had a scoop that revealed Germany’s friendly attitude was not fuelled by geniality alone. A confidential official document, which ‘a happy wind blew’ onto his desk, said the country must ‘methodically rectify the picture of Germany’ held by people overseas. ‘We are regarded by the world as poor, tasteless, egotistic, mean, dishonest, rude, stupid and raw people; our fatherland as unfruitful, of ugly aspect, politically gone to ground; our wares as rubbish.’104 This self-image gave rise to some overbearing attempts by Germans to ingratiate themselves with foreigners.

  Reynolds was sitting in the bar of the Hotel Adlon in Berlin one evening when he was subjected to just such an attempt. The Adlon was one of the main venues in which international visitors to Germany congregated between the wars. ‘Of course you hate the French,’ said the man Reynolds was talking to. ‘You see your culture and French culture as utterly different; whereas English culture and German culture are the same, and therefore we ought to be friends.’ A few days later a different German said exactly the same thing to him in a separate incident. He soon heard from the French ambassador that the Germans were using precisely the same line to visitors from France, but in reverse.105 There was calculation, it transpired, behind the cheerfulness.

  The official stance of friendship towards foreigners was not adopted by all Germans. In April 1921, Reynolds attended the funeral of Augusta Victoria, the last German Empress. The grand event was held in Potsdam rather than Berlin for fear that it may stir resentment towards the former imperial family in the capital, just three years after Kaiser Wilhelm II had abdicated in humiliation. Boys from a local school attended, prompting a German observer sitting behind Reynolds to remark loudly on how healthy they looked in spite of the enemy blockade.106 The wartime blockade had been carried out by Britain and its allies between 1914 and 1919 in an attempt to stop food and other supplies reaching the enemy Central Powers. It had not been forgotten.

  Overall a general attitude of friendship made life easier for Reynolds in his early years in Germany. And not all of it was forced. ‘The pleasing qualities of the Germans were to the fore during the first years after my return to Germany,’ he reflected.107 He reported on a visit by Ramsay MacDonald, leader of the Labour Party, who lectured in the Reichstag and was shown the countryside surrounding Berlin by the socialist Prime Minister of Prussia. Such a welcome to a socialist politician would have been unthinkable in the autocratic and militaristic days of the Kaisers. The Weimar Republic was Germany’s attempt at democracy, the model of governance adopted long before by Britain. Reynolds was supportive of Germany’s move towards a more modern form of government, but maintained an anti-German tone in his reports.

  The bloody and brutal years of the war could not be forgotten, as Reynolds’s dispatch from Cologne had made clear. The tone of his articles in his first few months was stridently, at times crudely, condemnatory of Germany and its people. ‘It is a tragedy to see German women trying to look like French women,’ he reported during a fashion week in Berlin in March 1921.108 The next month, in the article mentioned above headlined ‘The Bells in Berlin’, he described an idyllic Sunday morning scene in the capital, before his mood darkens as he angrily remembers how German troops in Warsaw had removed bells to make cannon during the war.109 In June he filed a report headlined ‘Those “Starving” German Children.’ ‘There are many people who eat too much,’ he sternly observed. ‘There is plenty of food in Germany.’ Though he admitted that some were still struggling to feed themselves three years after the war, the general message was that the country had far more food than was realised abroad.110

  In September 1921 Reynolds went again to Warsaw. He travelled by train to the city, which he had not been able to do since 1905. ‘The tedious crossing of the border was a romance,’ he wrote, describing how ‘the lands which a Prussian King stole’ were now part of a free Poland. However, his ensuing article for the Mail had a warning that would be proved prophetic by the events of 1939. Some voices in Germany were clamouring for the return of these lands. ‘We shall not rest until we are again in possession of our Polish provinces,’ he heard a politician tell a public meeting. Poland must be protected, Reynolds wrote. Her survival ‘depends particularly on England’.111

  The first president of Weimar Germany’s newly established republic was Friedrich Ebert. A tailor’s son, he led Germany’s Social Democratic Party and had a central role in the creation of the Weimar constitution, which brought parliamentary democracy to Germany. He served from 1919 to his death in February 1925. ‘There was not a better, more patriotic and more hard-working man in the country than the president,’ said Reynolds. ‘But he had no grip on the nation. He was rarely seen or heard. His modesty made him shrink from publicity.’112

  Reynolds felt that Germany needed a more forceful personality to lead a successful recovery after the war. Ebert’s leadership reflected what Reynolds saw as the ‘drab’ nature of Weimar Germany in its early years, with confidence low and food shortages still common in the wake of war. Though critical of German militarism, Reynolds thought the country had swung too far the other way. ‘Soldiers in fine uniforms on prancing horses, the flash of scarlet liveries in the streets, were no longer seen. The men of the Republic were grave, disliked pomp,’ he wrote.113

  ‘They ought to give the president a military household, like the French president,’ said a diplomat one day to Reynolds, who concurred.114 There was one politician in Weimar Germany who recognised the need to restore Germany’s self-confidence. Reynolds viewed Dr Gustav Stresemann, who was named Chancellor in August 1923, as the most able of the men who served Germany in the post-war years. Like several of the Weimar Chancellors he did not last long in office, but he served as Foreign Minister until 1929 and was hugely influential as the country progressed in those years. Stresemann understood how important displays of pageantry were to a country’s mood and self-belief. He made this clear at a briefing with Reynolds and other foreign journalists, in which he used the Catholic church as an example. If Catholic clergymen ‘attain eminence, the church clothes them in garments whose splendour emphasises their authority,’ he said.115 The state should do the same.

  But the lack of pageantry was the least of the Weimar Republic’s problems. Extremists on both left and right in Germany had plagued the republic in the early years after the war and centrist politicians struggled to assert control. Economic recovery was made more difficult by the terms of the Versailles Treaty, which was designed to extract full punishment from Germany after her defeat in the war. This was an ongoing source of bitterness for segments of the population. Though exhausted by war, Germany had not seen an enemy army occupy sizeable chunks of territory and some thought the surrender was premature. This led to the ‘stab-in-the-back’ myth, that politicians and civilians at home had betrayed the army by signing the Armistice. This theory would fuel the rise of extremist parties during the decade.

  That rise may not have been possible had Weimar enjoyed the long-term economic success and recovery that at times it looked capable of achieving. At the start o
f the 1920s, however, such progress seemed far off. The hyperinflation crisis was a particularly damaging economic episode that Reynolds witnessed first-hand. Germany’s currency had been weakening since 1921 but a new crisis at the start of 1923 worsened matters considerably. Germany had not been sending overseas the amount of coal and other raw materials required by the Versailles Treaty, and in January the French army marched into the Ruhr region to take control of the lucrative mining district. Germany initiated a policy of passive resistance in response, refusing to aid the occupiers, and printing money to pay the inoperative workers.

  This caused ‘an inflation of the debased currency of so extravagant a nature that the rate of exchange for foreign currency ran into astronomical figures,’ said Reynolds. ‘Fortunes melted away. People who had lived in affluence found themselves beggars, while others ingeniously increased their wealth. It was a disconcerting and fantastic period.’116 As someone living in Germany but paid in non-German currency, Reynolds was one of those who could live exceedingly well for next to nothing. On one occasion he enjoyed ‘an excellent luncheon in the restaurant of the Hotel Bristol, one of the best in Berlin, for exactly fourpence halfpenny, including drinks’.117

  For the first and only time in his life, Reynolds was rich. ‘In 1923 I became a billionaire, and more, a multi-billionaire, when the banks paid 16,500,000,000 marks for one English pound, if they happened to have the cash to pay with in their tills. Their difficulty was to get sufficient notes to pay their customers.’118 He then heard from an Australian lady visiting his office that foreigners could get even more for their currency if they exchanged it at the ‘black bourse’ rather than at the bank. ‘An extra six and a half billion marks on every pound was a very pleasant addition to my income,’ Reynolds wryly remarked.119