Reporting on Hitler Read online

  The anti-Russian feeling should not be underestimated. Even later, when Britain and Germany were at war, the philosopher Bertrand Russell said there was ‘no doubt that the Soviet Government is even worse than Hitler’s, and it will be a misfortune if it survives’.159 As communism put down roots in Russia during the 1920s, fears of its spreading rose. Rothermere was one of many vocal critics and Hitler had the nous to play on these fears. Portraying himself as a ‘Bulwark against Bolshevism’ was enough, almost until the end of the 1930s, to outweigh many overseas fears about his virulent anti-Semitism.

  The Daily Mail was not the only paper in Britain giving a platform to Hitler. On 28 September 1930, the day after Reynolds’s interview with him appeared, Hitler penned a comment piece for Lord Beaverbrook’s Sunday Express. Headlined ‘My Terms to the World’, he informed the newspaper’s readers that ‘our aim, our purpose is to free Germany from political and economic conditions that mean slavery’.160

  At the start of October, Lord Rothermere wrote another article, headlined ‘My Hitler Article and its Critics’. His support for Hitler had, he said, ‘shocked the old women of three countries – France, Germany, and our own’. Targeting his print rivals, whose views were taken far more seriously than his own, he continued: ‘A new idea invariably produces this effect upon the pompous pundits who pontificate in our weekly reviews and those old-fashioned morning newspapers whose sales and influence alike sink steadily month by month towards vanishing point.’161

  The Daily Mail, with its screaming headlines and sometimes extreme views, was regarded as a much less serious newspaper than more esteemed rivals such as The Times and Manchester Guardian. Both carried great influence at home and internationally, The Times within government circles and the Guardian on the liberal left. But the Mail could boast a readership that outnumbered The Times and the Guardian’s combined circulations several times over in the 1930s, selling about 1.6 million copies a day in 1937 – around eight times more than the circulation of The Times. For all its influence, the Manchester Guardian had daily sales to match its status as a regional newspaper, of between 25,000 and 50,000.162

  Lord Rothermere did not believe the borders imposed by the Treaty of Versailles should be viewed as permanent. The ‘old women’ writing for other newspapers, he wrote, ‘imagine that the hundred million Germans and Hungarians who make up the population of Central Europe will be content to remain forever artificially divided by unnatural boundaries fixed and forced upon them without their consultation or consent’. He had words of advice as well as support for Hitler and the Nazis. He advised them to cut out their anti-Semitism. Even though ‘the Jewish race has shown conspicuous political unwisdom since the war’, he was clear that ‘Jew-baiting is a stupid survival of medieval prejudice’.

  Reynolds was less convinced by Hitler than his boss. He may have portrayed him in a flattering light in his 1930 interview, but he knew that the Austrian firebrand was ultimately no solution to German problems. In the following months, as the depression sparked by the Wall Street Crash continued in Germany, Reynolds saw Chancellor Brüning as the right man to lead the country. The next summer he wrote a flattering profile of him that would no doubt have angered Hitler.

  Reynolds called Brüning the ‘Strongest Man Since Bismarck’ in the headline. He asserted that those in close working contact with the Chancellor said he had more ‘strength and determination’ than any German leader since Bismarck. ‘He is forty-six, and he lives as an ascetic. He works from early morning to late at night, and the only relaxation he allows himself is reading. He rarely goes into society and he rarely gives a dinner party.’ Reynolds added that after being wounded in the war, Brüning rose to prominence and was elected to the Reichstag in 1924. Since beginning in politics, his ‘profound knowledge of social and economic questions’ helped him rise quickly to the leadership of the Centre Party.163

  Yet more trouble was brewing. Economic conditions in Germany worsened and unemployment grew. The rise of the far-right alarmed overseas investors, who called in more of their loans. All levels of society were affected. With embarrassment, Reynolds was asked by one of his wealthy friends for small loans. Theatres and cinemas were almost empty. Shopping one day in one of Berlin’s busiest stores, Reynolds found that he was the only customer.

  Hitler’s confidence grew. At the start of December 1931 he called Reynolds in to see him. ‘There is not the slightest doubt,’ he said, ‘that the National Socialists will come to power in Germany. It may be soon and it may be in a year’s time; but there is nothing to stop the march of the party, which I founded with six men, seven with myself, and has grown to so many millions.’164

  A few days later Reynolds went to see Brüning, who by this time had picked up the label of ‘Iron Chancellor’. He was defiant about the Nazi rise. ‘It is very natural that extreme parties should grow in strength in such times as Germany has passed through,’ he said. But he was also complacent. ‘Half the success of the National Socialist party is due to hard times.’165

  A presidential election was scheduled for March 1932. At the age of eighty-four, Hindenburg, the incumbent and frontrunner, had not initially wanted to stand. It was a sign of how effectively the extreme parties were picking up supporters that the ageing war hero, figurehead of the old, militarist Germany, had to be persuaded to do so by the mainstream parties. Chancellor Brüning went so far as to call it grotesque that opponents dared to stand against Hindenburg. He described him as ‘the man who fought at Königgrätz, who saw the empire founded in 1870, who lived through the war and brought the army back from the field, and even then gave his services to the Fatherland for another seven years’.166

  Hitler was his main opponent and continued to attract more support with his incendiary message. ‘Hindenburg is today the candidate of the men who destroyed our proud army,’ he declared. ‘He is a candidate of the November criminals who have thrown the nation in the dust. He is a candidate of the Jews and war-profiteers.’167

  ‘Germany stands at a parting of the ways,’ Reynolds reported in a comment piece accompanying his main report before the election. Hindenburg ‘stands for the conservation of the system which was established thirteen years ago, and the men who were revolutionaries and innovators then form the Conservative element in the country now’. Hitler, meanwhile, is a ‘man of magnetic personality’ who ‘denounces the present system of government and proclaims his intention to smash it’.168

  Though others were standing, Reynolds knew it was a contest between Hindenburg and Hitler, and so it proved. In the first voting round in March none of the candidates won more votes than all of the others combined, which was required to win the poll. A second election was scheduled for April, in which the only candidates standing were Hindenburg, Hitler and the communist leader Ernst Thälmann. This time it was simple: whoever received the most votes would win.

  Sefton Delmer, the Daily Express’s correspondent in Berlin, had a unique vantage point from which to observe the next stage in the election. Alone among the British correspondents, he had been invited to accompany Hitler on an aeroplane tour of campaign stops ahead of the second vote. Delmer, who went by the name Tom, was Beaverbrook’s protégé at the Express. He had been working as a stringer for British newspapers in Berlin in 1927 when the Canadian press lord gave him a job. Within a year he was heading up the paper’s new bureau in Berlin, at the age of just twenty-four. He was young but hard-working and desperate to impress his master in London. Delmer’s illustrious career with the Express would last decades.

  In 1931 Delmer had a breakthrough during his attempts to make contacts within Nazi circles. He was introduced to Ernst Röhm, the head of Hitler’s storm troopers. Delmer described him as ‘the jovial little soldier of fortune with the shot-up face and a reputation for sexual abnormality’. But he was well aware of his importance at that early stage. ‘As chief of the storm troops, [Röhm] was the most powerful figure in the Nazi organisation beside Hitler himself.’169

&
nbsp; At their first meeting, Röhm was keen to downplay reports of violence within his group. ‘I know the storm troops have been a rough and rowdy lot in the past, my dear Herr Delmer,’ he said, raising his glass. ‘But from now on, you just watch! The men will be quiet and disciplined and orderly.’170 This first meeting was followed by an invitation to meet Hitler in May 1931, when Delmer became the first Englishman to visit the newly built Brown House Nazi headquarters in Munich. It was quite an improvement on the small and dingy office Reynolds had visited in 1923.

  Delmer was led into Hitler’s room, where an expensive-looking Persian carpet covered a parquet floor and tall windows looked onto a big balcony and the street beyond. Hitler, wearing a white shirt with black tie under a double-breasted blue suit, was in a corner talking to his associate Rudolf Hess. ‘The very first impression he made on me was that of a very ordinary fellow,’ Delmer later said.171 Soon Hitler and Delmer were left alone and the reporter struggled to make himself heard as Hitler got carried away in a vicious tirade against the French. ‘Herr Hitler,’ he interrupted, ‘your Stabschef Major Röhm tells me that you are anxious to secure the friendship of Britain.’

  This set Hitler ‘off like a bomb,’ Delmer wrote.

  ‘I believe,’ the Nazi leader said, ‘that Britain’s interests are similar to those of Germany, and that we can therefore cooperate with Britain as also with Italy.’172 The piece Delmer wrote for the Express after this meeting, which reported that ‘Germany is marching with great strides to join the ranks of the fascist nations of Europe’, greatly pleased the Nazis.173 Delmer had proven his worth to them and he quickly became the English journalist they trusted most in the early 1930s. Röhm became a trusted source, sharing gossip and news with him ahead of other reporters.

  By April 1932 the relationship Delmer had established with the Nazis was strong enough for them to invite him to observe Hitler’s election tour. Ernst ‘Putzi’ Hanfstaengl was Hitler’s public relations officer with the foreign newspapermen (Goebbels and his Propaganda Ministry would later assume control of such matters). German-born with an American mother, Putzi had studied at Harvard and spent the First World War trying to look after his family’s art business in New York. He had been behind the successful introduction of American methods of electioneering to Hitler’s campaigns. He had based the highly choreographed parades of marching storm troopers on his memories of Democrats and Republicans marching in America with brass bands.

  Putzi had organised Delmer’s inclusion in the tour, which allowed the young reporter to observe Hitler at close quarters for long periods. He noticed how Hitler transformed from a confident, crowd-pleasing speaker in public to an awkward, sometimes surly, character in private. On the very first flight, Delmer wrote, Hitler ‘just sat there, staring gloomily out of the window, his chin cradled in his right hand, wads of cotton wool in his ears’.174 While others on the plane journey ate meat, drank alcohol and smoked, Hitler ‘ate only vegetable dishes – usually an enormous plate of carrots, peas, asparagus, onions, leeks, sliced kohlrabi and potatoes, all mixed up together under a thick white sauce’.175

  Others in the press pack thought Delmer was too close to the Nazis – that he had sacrificed his journalistic integrity by embedding himself so deeply with Hitler’s campaign. He thought he was just doing his job. ‘The truth was that I had realised the political importance and the human interest of Hitler’s fight for the chancellorship a little earlier than some of my brethren.’176

  On some occasions he almost certainly did get too close. After the campaign plane landed for Hitler to make a speech on 5 April, Delmer was one of the small group following the Nazi leader to the podium. But instead of watching the speech from the crowd he found himself on the stage sitting behind Hitler. ‘I was up on the dais sitting on a hard chair with a huge swastika banner hanging down from the balustrade in front of me, and looking down into this crowd that had been waiting here for Hitler since the early morning.’177 As a supposedly independent journalist, Delmer should have kept more distance, but struggled.

  Some of Delmer’s admiration for Hitler may have made it into the Express, but – like many British newspapers – it did not regard Hitler in 1932 as a major threat to global stability. He was widely seen as a right-wing populist who was unlikely to be around for long. However, headlines in the Daily Mail during the run-up to the re-election were far from understated. It was described as ‘Germany’s Fateful Election’ and the ‘Poll That Affects the World’.

  Reynolds’s reporting on Hitler strayed from an impartial line – the looming influence of Rothermere in London is again evident. ‘His appeal to patriotism and to the hopes of youth is tremendous. There is so much misery in Germany that the appeal comes with tremendous force to those who are suffering, and many will vote for Herr Hitler on Sunday because they have come to the point where they would give a chance to any system which might make life better.’178

  The line appeared as an emboldened paragraph in the Daily Mail. It is not hard to imagine Rothermere standing over a hapless sub-editor’s shoulder as he went over the piece, directing which parts to emphasise. He would certainly have been in Reynolds’s mind when he wrote it. Rothermere was a domineering press baron, the BBC journalist John Simpson wrote in his 2010 book about twentieth-century journalism, Unreliable Sources.179

  He influenced the angle and content of stories and had ultimate control over the editorial line. Rothermere was just as inclined to exert his influence as his late, elder brother Lord Northcliffe – who is often seen as the archetypal interfering press baron. His rival at the Daily Express, the upstart Canadian Lord Beaverbrook, also had a tendency to interfere, which would become more pronounced towards the end of the 1930s. All three men were intensely political and used their newspapers to force their views on the British public to an extent that was unrivalled at the time. It was an unhealthy, unpopular approach that would cause problems for the Daily Mail and its reporters as the 1930s went on.

  Hindenburg won the election with 52 per cent of the vote. Hitler took 37 per cent while just a tenth of electors voted for the communists. Hitler was now firmly installed as the anti-establishment candidate, his position made stronger by Hindenburg’s advancing years and the unpopularity of most members of the political mainstream. When Brüning’s government collapsed at the end of May 1932, he prepared to capitalise on the tumult.

  Hindenburg and Brüning had fallen out after the latter had planned to break up the estates of some great landowners, a move that could have had an impact on the president. Brüning’s government resigned. ‘President von Hindenburg has accepted their resignation, and in his hands lies the fate of Germany,’ Reynolds reported. ‘What he intends to do no man knows, and for the present the ship of State is drifting in dangerous waters without a pilot.’180

  Hindenburg replaced Brüning with Franz von Papen of the Centre Party. Short of support in the Reichstag, the new man had little chance of ruling successfully. After just days in office, he called elections for July. The build-up took place in an atmosphere of uncertainty and violence. There were clashes between the brown-shirted Nazi storm troopers – who had been banned by Brüning towards the end of his reign, a move reversed by von Papen – and Communist Party paramilitary. ‘Once let loose, this horde of young hooligans began to attack political opponents with knives and pistols. From all over Germany came accounts of fighting in towns, of the sacking of trade-union or Socialist premises, of retaliation by opponents, of cold-blooded murder,’ Reynolds wrote.181

  There was a sense that those in power were losing control. Martial law was proclaimed, yet this did not stop the warring Nazis and communists. It was a chaotic, bloody time. As far as politics was concerned, there was only one story in town: Hitler. Could the Nazi leader build on his remarkable support in the presidential election? Rothermere sent Reynolds to accompany Hitler on a campaigning tour of East Prussia. The Nazis had regarded their invitation to Delmer to accompany Hitler during the presidential election
as a success and extended the practice. East Prussia had been part of the German Empire on the Baltic coast and remained part of Weimar Germany under the terms of the Versailles Treaty. This was despite being cut off from the rest of the country by West Prussia, which had become part of Poland.

  The journalists on the trip included Reynolds’s friend John Segrue of the News Chronicle. The tour was an incredible insight into the levels of popular support Hitler was attracting in the provinces. One night the convoy of cars transporting Hitler and his campaign group, accompanied by a band of weary reporters, was travelling to a hotel after a day of speeches. Reynolds and the other journalists had listened to Hitler make the same speech six times in one day and were eager for a rest. The convoy flew through the darkness, enveloped by a black, forested landscape, before pulling over to refuel. Here Hitler had an encounter that made a lasting impression on Reynolds.

  A small group of villagers were walking home from a local inn when they noticed Hitler and his group standing by their cars. One of Hitler’s lieutenants moved to bring one of them forward, a bearded peasant who looked so old that Reynolds thought he may have fought against the French in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.

  Hitler’s eyes, illuminated by the light of the nearby inn, seemed to shine bright as he looked down at the ageing peasant. ‘You have lived in a mighty Germany; you have lived in a weak Germany; you will live again in a mighty Germany,’ he intoned deeply. The man, who did not say a word in response, looked to Reynolds as if he had been put under a spell. He did not doubt that Hitler had won the vote of the man.182 ‘The old man was a convert in an instant,’ Reynolds wrote.183

  Hitler’s message that he would restore Germany to greatness was underpinned by brutal attacks on the men who had led the Weimar Republic. In speech after speech he accused them of bringing misery to Germany, conveniently ignoring that the republic had been born in the most difficult of circumstances in the wake of the Great War. Reynolds later wrote of how he had witnessed Hitler repeat the ‘patently false idea’ that Weimar leaders had inherited a ‘country in exemplary order’.