Wishful Thinking
HOTTELET, RICHARD C.
Wishful Thinking Making Friends with Hitler: Lord Londonderry, the Nazis and the Road to War By Ian Kershaw Penguin. 488 pp. $29.95. Reviewed by Richard C. Hottelet Former CBS News...
...Though the focus is on a single individual," the author writes, "the book tries to recapture the attitudes that underpinned and made possible policies of appeasement...
...Reviewed by Richard C. Hottelet Former CBS News Correspondent Ian Kershaw, the masterful biographer of Adolf Hitler, has taken another look at the events leading up to World War II...
...He spent the rest of his life protesting that he had been right all along and berating the political leaders who had rejected his advice...
...In November 1938 the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris by a distraught Jew triggered the so-called Kristallnacht...
...Within weeks of his ouster he and Lady Londonderry were in Germany...
...The King called him 'Charley.' Members of the royal family were frequently guests in his London mansion...
...Halifax convinced him to stay home...
...Multilateral security through the League of Nations was a shaky proposition...
...The next move, however, was Hitler's: He created a puppet Slovak state, sent his Army into unoccupied Bohemia, and himself entered Prague on March 15, 1939...
...Prime ministers stood at the head of the magnificent staircase at Londonderry House [on Park Lane] to greet the hundreds of guests at sumptuous receptions...
...The indignities of his political decline were replaced by lavish hospitality and flattery from Hitler, Hermann Goring, Rudolf Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and the rest...
...Nevertheless, he thought it justified...
...In 1931 he entered the government as Air Minister...
...His expansionist aims, as outlined in Mein Kampf, were ignored...
...Some were eccentric, but they were not freaks...
...Unlike the Communist fellow travelers, they were not captivated by a false ideal...
...Not until his death did newspapers recall that as Air Minister he started the development of the Spitfire and Hurricane, which won the Battle of Britain in 1940...
...Londonderry was less pessimistic, and her prophecy was soon forgotten...
...Standing at the window of the Chancellor's palace, she, her husband and their daughter Mairi watched a torchlight procession of tens of thousands of storm troopers down Wilhelmstrasse...
...In the face of popular clamor to outlaw aerial bombing, Londonderry urged expansion of the Royal Air Force, specifically of its bomber arm...
...When Hitler "solved" the first problem with the Anschluss of Austria, Londonderry found it dangerous and "hardly distinguishable from war itself...
...Many felt he was merely breaking the humiliating bonds of the Versailles Treaty...
...Londonderry did not get the message...
...This was policy from a position of weakness, because Britain had no effective strength...
...What marked them, and Londonderry more than most, was their rational choice to prevent war—on a false premise...
...His very close connections with Hitler and Goring, he naively believed, would ensure a hearing of his "whole case"—i.e...
...Londonderry described the Munich agreement, in which Chamberlain gave Hitler the Sudetenland, as "the fulfillment of all my hopes...
...A consideration for many who regarded the Soviet Union with growing concern was Hitler's belligerent anti-Communism coupled, as it was, with repeated calls for an understanding with Britain...
...peace in return for massive concessions...
...Anti-French feeling was widespread in Britain...
...His purpose was to find out what the Nazi leaders were doing, what they planned for the future, and what the chances were of their coming to the conference table to discuss an arms control agreement with Britain and France...
...And, while a certain cultural anti-Semitism was endemic in the upper classes, they were revolted by the barbarity of the Nazis—when they happened to focus on it...
...They attempted to deter him from additional aggression by raising the possibility of a two-front war in which Britain and France would join with Poland and Romania...
...There were really only two things I could do," he later wrote...
...He was soon under great pressure...
...The imperative of peace was paramount...
...Winston Churchill was his second cousin...
...Alliance with France, itself shattered by the War, was no guarantee...
...They were not pro-Nazi...
...This would mean reversing the pacifism and call for disarmament that was so strongly held in the 1920s and '30s...
...Londonderry did not join them...
...After several years of asking formore," Churchill observed, Londonderry was "suddenly turned out for not asking enough...
...But the Cabinet, under the weight of economic depression, would not give him the money he sought to strengthen the RAF...
...Londonderry was on first-name terms with all the major political figures of the day...
...Throughout Germany Jews were killed, synagogues were burned and windows of Jewish-owned shops were smashed...
...They wouldn't let me do either...
...As for the Jews, Kershaw believes Lon donderry never understood the racial obsession that moved Hitler all the way to the Holocaust...
...Once in power, Hitler pressed German rearmament on land and in the air...
...He has succeeded in enormous, frequently colorful, detail...
...All were miles away from Oswald Mosley's disreputable British Fascists...
...When Neville Chamberlain became prime minister in 1937 with a policy of appeasement, it was not, as Londonderry wanted, a search for friendship with Germany but an improvement of relations so that British armament could be completed...
...Londonderry then devoted all his energy to the latter...
...To Lord Londonderry it did not mean simply giving in to Hitler...
...This bit of history is well worth reading and, as a dividend, the notes and index are great...
...After years in and out of public life, with no career to match the ambitions that a man of his social status felt he had the right to entertain, at age 53 he was given the chance to act...
...But in May 1940, after Hitler's blitzkrieg in the West, when the noose was tightening around the British Army at Dunkirk, he did suggest bribing Mussolini (by offering territory) to intercede with Hitler...
...In August, with the German spin all for peace, he proposed that he go to Berlin...
...Mairi heard her mother say, "This means war, Charley...
...He was regarded as Hitler's leading apologist in Great Britain...
...An alarmed British public then demanded an increase in air power...
...This latest aggression, after satisfaction of his "last territorial demand," further enraged the British public...
...Londonderry continued to preach closer relations with Germany, reaching back to his ancestor Lord Casflereagh, who at the Congress of Vienna had helped a beaten France rejoin Europe...
...A powerful, reliable partner was needed, and Hitler was certainly strong...
...He returned home none the wiser...
...There were dozens like him among his peers...
...Led by Churchill, the Cabinet said no...
...Halifax favored the idea and brought it to the fateful meeting of the War Cabinet on May 28...
...In Making Friends with Hitler, the author chooses Charles Stewart Henry Vane-Tempest-Stewart as a template because of his prominence...
...His premise continued to be, "I know Hitler does not want to fight, in fact, he dreads war...
...Londonderry, meanwhile, let it be known that he would accept German dominance on the Continent as a basis for any future peace negotiations...
...Each was a responsible, intelligent, conservative patriot...
...In the years before Hitler's ascent to power there had been considerable proGerman feeling in Britain— expressed, for instance, in the British Legion, the organization of ex-servicemen...
...Kershaw explains in his Preface why he spent years mining a mountain of sources to tell the sad story of a wellmeaning, inadequate, quixotic gentleman's descent from misunderstanding to failure and ostracism...
...Six months later he was removed from another post that was to have been a consolation...
...After his usual exchange of Christmas greetings with Hitler and Goring, he told the prime minister it would be worthwhile inviting Goring to London...
...Later he called it a disaster because Chamberlain had failed to get Germany, France and Italy to join Britain in "vetoing" war altogether and acting for the amelioration of world problems...
...The protracted drama of Czechoslovakia followed immediately...
...On March 31, Britain guaranteed Poland against invasion—but even this showed a touch of appeasement, since the guarantee did not cover Poland's existing borders...
...Hitler's treaty with Stalin and the destruction of Poland were followed by months of a stagnant "phony war" and yet another effort by some Conservative peers to negotiate peace...
...But he and his wife were deeply impressed...
...Until then, Britain would have to live with a German sphere of interest in Central and Eastern Europe, orchestrating the issues of Austria, Czechoslovakia and Danzig...
...The Fiihrer's savage suppression of all opposition could be rationalized as the nervous excess of a new regime...
...After he took office as Chancel lor on January 30, 1933 there remained a willingness to see his violation of treaties andhisown utterances as justifiable...
...Appeasement was not yet a dirty word...
...Britain exploded in outrage, but Londonderry wrote to Goring in mild protest that it made his pro-German stance more difficult...
...The 7th Marquess of Londonderry, a scion of one of Britain's grandest and wealthiest families, was a pillar of the Conservative Party...
...Chamberlain and his foreign minister, Lord Halifax, concluded that there was no dealing with the Führer...
...There were, henceforth, no more government initiatives to seek peace with Hitler...
...Build an Air Force, or try to make friends with the Germans...
...He wanted Britain to pursue a policy of friendship from a position of strength...
...This time, though, the protagonist is an English aristocrat, someone probably known today only to those with a special interest in that period...
...As Kershaw writes, "socially and politically [he] could scarcely have been better connected...
...It was wishful thinking that made this sizable group believe Hitler could be trusted in his protestations of peace...
...Upon their return she wrote to Hitler, "I am amazed...
...The double dismissal was a bitter blow to the nobleman's pride...
...You and Germany remind me of the book of Genesis in the Bible...
Vol. 87 • November 2004 • No. 6
