CHAPTER NINE
In Germany, at the election held on 31 July 1932, Adolf Hitler, head of the opposition Nazi Party, won 230 seats, as against 133 for the Social Democrats, and 78 for the Communists. With more than thirteen million votes, the Nazi Party was the largest Party in the State. But they had won only 37.1 per cent of the total poll. The German Chancellor, Franz von Papen, refused to invite them to join his Cabinet. Hitler’s immediate reaction to his exclusion from power was to intensify terror in the streets, using his Brownshirt thugs to beat up political opponents and Jews. On 29 August 1932, bowing to the force of terror, von Papen offered Hitler the post of Vice-Chancellor. Hitler refused. His aim was to be offered the Chancellorship itself.
At that moment Churchill left England for Germany with his wife and two of their children, Sarah and Randolph. Churchill was writing a biography of his illustrious military ancestor, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, for which he had received valuable constructive criticism from a leading British Jewish historian, Polish-born Professor Lewis Namier. At one point Churchill even contemplated asking Namier to be his principal collaborator.1
Churchill’s work took him to the scenes of Marlborough’s battles, including Blenheim, in Bavaria. It was a Jew, Solomon de Medina, the first practising Jew in England to receive a knighthood, who was Marlborough’s chief army contractor during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14) supplying Marlborough with money, provisions and military intelligence. Medina later gave evidence against Marlborough for having received six thousand pounds a year from him for his personal use, in return for the supply contract. This was no more, Marlborough explained to the Commissioners of Accounts, than what had earlier been ‘allowed as a perquisite’ to generals and commanders-in-chief. Churchill was convinced that although the charge was true, Medina had framed it ‘in an injurious and misleading form.’2
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While in Munich, Randolph wanted to introduce his father to Hitler, and asked one of Hitler’s friends, Ernst Hanfstaengel, to arrange a meeting. Churchill and Hanfstaengel dined together at Churchill’s hotel in Munich. Fifteen years later Churchill recalled how, during dinner, Hanfstaengel ‘gave a most interesting account of Hitler’s activities and outlook. He spoke as one under the spell.’3
Hanfstaengel told Churchill that, as Hitler came each afternoon to that same hotel, ‘nothing would be easier’ than for the two men to meet. Hanfstaengel hoped that Hitler would join Churchill after dinner. ‘I turned up at the appointed hour,’ Hanfstaengel recalled. ‘Mr Churchill taxed me about Hitler’s anti-Semitic views. I tried to give as mild an account of the subject as I could, saying that the real problem was the influx of eastern European Jews and the excessive representation of their co-religionaries in the professions, to which Churchill listened very carefully, commenting, “Tell your boss from me that anti-Semitism may be a good starter, but it is a bad sticker.”’
On the following day Hanfstaengel made one further effort to persuade Hitler to meet Churchill, but in vain. Two days later the Churchills left Munich. Hitler, Hanfstaengel noted, ‘kept away until they had gone.’4
Churchill later recalled, of his near meeting with Hitler: ‘In the course of conversation with Hanfstaengl, I happened to say “Why is your chief so violent about the Jews? I can quite understand being angry with Jews who have done wrong or are against the country, and I understand resisting them if they try to monopolise power in any walk of life; but what is the sense of being against a man simply because of his birth? How can any man help how he is born?” He must have repeated this to Hitler, because about noon the next day he came round with rather a serious air and said that the appointment he had made with me to meet Hitler could not take place as the Fuehrer would not be coming to the hotel that afternoon. This was the last I saw of “Putzi” – for such was his pet name – although we stayed several more days at the hotel.’5
During his stay in Munich, Churchill saw a procession of uniformed Brownshirts; they were unarmed, but their fanaticism was intense. Within three months, on 30 January 1933, Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany. During the last week of March a Nazi manifesto instructed local organisations throughout Germany ‘to carry on anti-Jewish propaganda among the people.’ On 13 April, a law came into effect barring all Jews from national, local and municipal office. That day, during a debate in the House of Commons, Churchill warned the government of the dangers involved in a militarised Germany, telling the House of Commons that ‘one of the things which we were told after the Great War would be a security for us was that Germany would be a democracy with Parliamentary institutions. All that has been swept away. You have dictatorship – most grim dictatorship.’
In his speech to the House of Commons, Churchill stressed several aspects of the German dictatorship: the militarism, appeals ‘to every form of fighting spirit’, the reintroduction of duelling in the universities, and the persecution of the Jews. Given these things, he commented, ‘I cannot help rejoicing that the Germans have not got the heavy cannon, the thousands of military aeroplanes and the tanks of various sizes for which they have been pressing in order that their status may be equal to that of other countries.’
Churchill then warned the House of the folly of continuing British disarmament. This was the policy to which the government, headed by the Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald, but with predominantly Conservative support, was firmly committed. ‘When we read about Germany,’ Churchill said, ‘when we watch with surprise and distress the tumultuous insurgence of ferocity and war spirit, the pitiless ill-treatment of minorities, the denial of the normal protections of civilised society to large numbers of individuals solely on the ground of race – when we see that occurring in one of the most gifted, learned, scientific and formidable nations in the world, one cannot help feeling glad that the fierce passions that are raging in Germany have not found, as yet, any other outlet but upon Germans.’
There were not only ‘martial or pugnacious manifestations’ in Germany, Churchill pointed out, but also ‘this persecution of the Jews, of which so many Hon. Members have spoken, and which appeals to everyone who feels that men and women have a right to live in the world where they were born, and have a right to pursue a livelihood which has hitherto been guaranteed them under the public laws of the land of their birth.’
With extraordinary prescience, Churchill then made another point, full of foreboding. ‘There is a danger,’ he warned, ‘of the odious conditions now ruling in Germany being extended by conquest to Poland, and another persecution and pogrom of Jews being begun in this new area.’6 There were six hundred thousand Jews in Germany in 1933, and more than three million in Poland. At a time when most British politicians doubted Germany’s aggressive intentions, Churchill’s forecast seemed far-fetched. Within ten years it had come to pass.
The Nazis, who were assiduously courting Western opinion, were angered by Churchill’s speech, especially his censure of their anti-Jewish measures. On 19 April a correspondent of the Birmingham Post reported from Berlin: ‘Today newspapers are full with “sharp warnings” for England.’ One headline referred to ‘Mr Winston Churchill’s “impudence”’.7
Among Churchill’s visitors in the spring of 1933 was German-born Albert Einstein, who had been in the United States when Hitler came to power. Being Jewish, neither his fame nor his Nobel Prize could help him. In Nazi eyes, as a Jew he was an outcast. Einstein, who was five years younger than Churchill, visited him at Chartwell, where he asked Churchill’s help in bringing Jewish scientists from Germany. Churchill responded at once, encouraging his friend Professor Frederick Lindemann – who was at Chartwell during Einstein’s visit – to travel to Germany and seek out Jewish scientists who could be found places at British universities.8 Lindemann did so. As part of a nationwide British university effort, he was able to offer university places to German Jewish scientists who, as a result of these invitations, were able to leave Germany.
It was not always easy, even for a man of Churchill’s stature, to persuade others to help. Since 1929 he had been Chancellor of Bristol University, an honorary but respected position. When he approached the Vice-Chancellor of the university, Thomas Loveday, on behalf of one of his parliamentary constituents, to give a place to a twenty-two-year-old German-Jewish medical student, thus enabling the student to leave Germany, the Vice-Chancellor replied that he would ask the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine to look at the application, but added, ‘We have of course to limit the number of these unfortunate people from Germany whom we can accept for training as doctors in this country.’9 Three months later, Loveday wrote again. There had been ‘a heavy rush’ on entry to the Faculty of Medicine that year ‘and we have had to refuse applications for entry from all foreign countries and even from some of the Dominions.’10
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In the autumn of 1934, Churchill and his wife left England on board the yacht of their friend Lord Moyne, for a holiday in Lebanon, Syria – both under French rule – Palestine, Transjordan and Egypt. They began in Beirut, from where they drove to Palmyra and Damascus and then, on 9 October, across the French-ruled Golan Heights and into British Mandate Palestine, to Nazareth. On the following day they drove through Nablus to Jerusalem, staying at the recently opened King David Hotel, where Lord Moyne joined them. After a night at the hotel, all three left Jerusalem by car for Jericho, then flew east to Amman and south over Transjordan to the ancient city of Petra, from where they flew westward across the Negev and Sinai deserts and the Suez Canal to Cairo.11
Churchill’s brief holiday visit to Palestine coincided with a spate of night-time Arab attacks on Jewish villages, which often culminated in the destruction of orchards and crops. For ten years the Palestinian Arabs had been incited to violence against the Jews by their spiritual leader, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, whose aim was to bring an end to Jewish immigration and the prospect of a Jewish majority, and to see Arab rule throughout the area of the Mandate.
British policy was to deter the Arab attackers by the collective punishment – in the form of fines – of the Arab villages from which the attacks came. Churchill supported this. Having returned to Britain he wrote to the High Commissioner, Sir Arthur Wauchope: ‘I am very much obliged to you for your kindness in writing to me about the effects of collective fining. The results are most encouraging, and thoroughly justify the course you adopted in dealing with the singularly cruel offence of destroying fruit trees in a thirsty land. Thank you also for telling me about the level of the Sea of Galilee. I hope indeed this will cure itself with more rains. I greatly enjoyed my flying visit to Palestine, and was struck by the unanimity with which your praises were sung.’12
For the second time in thirteen years Churchill saw the efforts that the Jews were making to develop a thriving agricultural economy in Palestine, and the obstacles that were being put in their way by their Arab neighbours.
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In Britain, a General Election was called for 14 November 1935. As the day drew near, it was rumoured that Churchill would be brought back into government. On 24 October he spoke publicly of the dangers to Britain and Europe of German rearmament and of the German population being ‘trained from childhood for war.’13 On the following day the British Ambassador in Berlin, Sir Eric Phipps, sent the Foreign Office an article by the London correspondent of the official Nazi Völkischer Beobachter, stating ‘that as soon as Mr Churchill opens his mouth, it is safe to bet that an attack on Germany will emerge. He is one of the most unscrupulous political intriguers in England. His friendship with the American Jewish millionaire Baruch leads him to expend all his remaining force and authority in directing England’s action against Germany. This is the man whom the government are apparently thinking of including in the Cabinet.’14
In an article in the Strand, a widely circulated monthly magazine published in both Britain and the United States, Churchill described in uncompromising language the militaristic and racist aspects of the Nazi regime. His sources of information were wide-ranging. He had read Hitler’s own book, Mein Kampf (My Struggle), and followed the often detailed British newspaper accounts of Nazi rule. Friends in the Foreign Office and the Intelligence Service had brought him first-hand information about the severity of Nazi rule. ‘Hitler’s triumphant career has been borne onwards,’ he wrote in his Strand article, ‘not only by a passionate love of Germany, but by currents of hatred so intense as to sear the souls of those who swim upon them. Hatred of the French is the first of these currents, and we have only to read Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf, to see that the French are not the only foreign nation against whom the anger of rearmed Germany may be turned. But the internal stresses are even more striking. The Jews, supposed to have contributed, by a disloyal and pacifist influence, to the collapse of Germany at the end of the Great War, were also deemed to be the main prop of communism and the authors of defeatist doctrines in every form. Therefore, the Jews of Germany, a community numbered by many hundreds of thousands, were to be stripped of all power, driven from every position in public and social life, expelled from the professions, silenced in the Press, and declared a foul and odious race.’
The twentieth century, Churchill wrote, had witnessed ‘with surprise, not merely the promulgation of these ferocious doctrines, but their enforcement with brutal vigour by the Government and by the populace.’ The Jews were the chief victims of these doctrines. ‘No past services, no proved patriotism, even wounds sustained in war, could procure immunity for persons whose only crime was that their parents had brought them into the world. Every kind of persecution, grave or petty, upon the world-famous scientists, writers, and composers at the top down to the wretched little Jewish children in the national schools, was practised, was glorified, and is still being practised and glorified.’
A ‘similar proscription’, Churchill noted, had fallen on socialists and communists, the trade unionists and the liberal intelligentsia. The slightest criticism was an offence against the State. The courts of justice ‘though allowed to function in ordinary cases, are superseded for every form of political offence by so-called people’s courts composed of ardent Nazis. Side by side with the training grounds of the new armies and the great aerodromes, the concentration camps pock-mark the German soil.’ In those camps, ‘thousands of Germans coerced and cowed into submission to the irresistible power of the Totalitarian State.’
In a question that went to the heart of the debate about whether Nazism might moderate its extremism, Churchill asked his readers whether Hitler, ‘in the full sunlight of worldly triumph, at the head of the great nation he has raised from the dust, still feels racked by the hatreds and antagonisms of his desperate struggle,’ or would those hatreds and antagonisms be discarded like the armour and the cruel weapons of strife under the mellowing influences of success?’ Churchill noted that those foreign visitors who had met Hitler had found him ‘a highly competent, cool, well-informed functionary with an agreeable manner…’ The world still hoped that the worst might be over, ‘and that we may yet live to see Hitler a gentler figure in a happier age.’ Yet while Hitler himself had begun to speak ‘words of reassurance’ in public, in Germany itself ‘the great wheels revolve, the rifles, the cannon, the tanks, the shot and shell, the air-bombs, the poison-gas cylinders, the aeroplanes, the submarines, and now the beginnings of a fleet flow in ever-broadening streams from the already largely war-mobilised arsenals and factories of Germany.’15
The Nazis were outraged by Churchill’s article. On 29 October, Sir Eric Phipps telegraphed to the Foreign Office from Berlin that the German Foreign Ministry had instructed the German ambassador in London ‘to lodge a strong protest against the personal attack on the Head of the German State made in an article by Mr Winston Churchill in the Strand magazine. The tone of his article is much resented here. The magazine will be prohibited and the press will probably be allowed to publish no more than a bald statement to the effect that a protest has been lodged.’16
Despite German protests, Churchill reiterated his fears of German methods and intentions in each of his election speeches. His worry was that people would not fully recognise the dangers. Churchill also did his utmost to keep himself well informed about the situation of the Jews in Germany. At the end of November 1935 he met Baroness von Goldschmidt Rothschild. The Baroness was the only daughter of a German coal magnate, Herr von Friedländer-Fuld, of Berlin, who had died in 1916 leaving her valuable coal mines. In January 1914 the Baroness had married a cousin of Clementine Churchill, but the marriage was annulled later in the year. She subsequently married a cousin of Churchill’s friend, the Liberal Member of Parliament James de Rothschild. Churchill was shocked by what she told him about the new anti-Jewish legislation, the Nuremberg Laws, that decreed the Jews to be second class citizens.
It was through Leonard Montefiore, a member of the Central British Fund set up to help German Jews after 1933, that Churchill received the reply to a query he had made of the Baroness. On 9 December 1935, Montefiore wrote to Churchill: ‘I had a message from the Baroness von Goldschmidt Rothschild that you would like to see a translation of the recent Nuremberg laws affecting the Jews in Germany. I therefore enclose a translation of the laws which appeared in the Manchester Guardian together with a commentary and also one from The Times. I also enclose a translation of the administrative regulations. I also venture to send a small pamphlet of my own, which attempts to give a description of the situation as it was just before the laws were passed.’17
The Manchester Guardian cutting, dated 16 September 1935, set out the text of the Nuremberg Laws, which forbade, among other things, ‘Marriage between Jews and citizens of the nation of German or kindred blood.’ The newspaper noted that ‘Another section of this law forbids Jews to employ female citizens of German or kindred blood in their households. Jews are also forbidden to hoist the Reich or national flag or to display the Reich colours. On the other hand they are permitted to display the Jewish colours. The execution of this right is under State protection.’ The Manchester Guardian noted that ‘The principal burden of the Law was to deprive German Jews (many of whose ancestors had come to Germany more than a thousand years before, and many of whom had fought in the German Army in the First World War) of German citizenship.’18
Churchill absorbed these harsh facts, and recognised yet more clearly how central and how implacable were Nazi anti-Jewish policies, both on paper and in practice. Further evidence reached him in May 1936, when Harold Laski, the son of his Manchester Jewish friend Nathan Laski, sent Churchill a 287-page book, published by Victor Gollancz, The Yellow Spot: The Extermination of the Jews in Germany. The book described in graphic detail ‘the outlawing of half a million human beings: a collection of facts and documents relating to three years’ persecution of German Jews, derived chiefly from National Socialist sources, very carefully assembled by a group of investigators.’19
‘I have not yet had time to read the terrible book you have sent me,’ Churchill wrote to Laski, and went on to urge the leading Labour Party thinker to ‘think a little meanwhile of how to preserve the strength of England, the hope of freedom.’20 This was a reference to the Labour Party’s determined opposition to British rearmament – not to follow the Labour Party’s policy of disarmament. For Churchill, the only way to halt the onward march of Nazism was for all the threatened nations to arm, and to join together under the collective security clauses of the Covenant of the League of Nations. ‘Arms and the Covenant’ was Churchill’s call. But even some of those most concerned about the persecution of the Jews in Germany failed to see, for it was not the policy either of the Labour or the Conservative Parties, that a robust British foreign policy might serve as a deterrent to German expansion.