Making friends with Hitler
Making friends with Hitler: Lord Lononderry and Britain's road to war, By Ian Kershaw, Allen Lane, $55
Has there ever been more of a British upper-class twit in public life than Lord Londonderry? Charles Stewart Henry Vane-Tempest-Stewart, and his wife, Lady Londonderry, were all the things that define such creatures: clueless, condescending, impossibly rich, impossibly refulgent in their own world. Lord Londonderry was born in 1878 into immense wealth, a lineage back to Castlereagh, a cousin of Winston Churchill, and was called Charley by the King.
Such persons of marginal historical interest would have stayed that way but for a visit by historian Ian Kershaw to Mount Stewart, the Londonderry mansion in Northern Ireland, several years ago. There among the gilded decor and rustle of ghosts was a white porcelain statuette of a Nazi stormtrooper. What on earth was that doing there, wondered Kershaw.
The statuette, he discovered, was a gift to Londonderry from Joachim von Ribbentrop on a visit to Mount Stewart in 1936. Ribbentrop was German ambassador to London at the time and later become the Nazis' Foreign Minister.
In researching the Londonderry-Herr connection, as it was called at the time, Kershaw has stitched together the tapestry of a period of British social and political life that played a crucial part in the lead-up to World War II.
The 1930s became known derogatorily as the decade of appeasement, but what Kershaw shows through the twittering and twaddling of the upper classes and the procrastination of the political classes is that everything has a context.
After World War I, the so-called war to end all wars, the nations of Europe were gutted - financially, materially and spiritually. Britain especially just wanted peace.
Talk of disarmament was in the air, culminating in a Disarmament Conference in the early 1930s. It was this hunger for peace at all costs that played such a large part in Britain's difficulties in dealing with Hitler, who was arming Germany to the teeth.
By focusing on Londonderry, Kershaw, who wrote a monumental two-volume Hitler biography, Hubris and Nemesis, shows the interplay that was at work between social and political classes in dealing with Germany. It wasn't so much that Londonderry had an influential role (despite his own views on his importance), but he was prominent and had contacts in both countries.
Londonderry was Secretary of State for Air in the 1930s but was regarded - quite unfairly, as Kershaw points out - as a failure. He was moved to Lord Privy Seal but was booted out from there as well. His indignation at his fall from office smouldered within him for the rest of his life.
In many respects the profound changes in the world during his lifetime got in the way of the expectations that his privilege had planted as a birth-right. He was a fish out of water, flopping about every which way. He became an apologist for Hitler's Germany while denying he was a Nazi-lover or fascist.
Kershaw bends over backwards to be fair to the man, but in the end, Londonderry, through silly pronouncements privately and publicly, did enough to hang himself in the public's eyes.
The Londonderrys Lord and Lady were guests of Goering and Ribbentrop in Germany; they met Hitler, which prompted Lady Londonderry to write in a British paper that Hitler was a "man of arresting personality - a man with wonderful far-seeing eyes". She felt in the "presence of one truly great", a "simple man of action, beloved of modern Germany".
When, in 1938, Londonderry published his book Ourselves and Germany, he mailed copies to all his friends in Germany. In Hitler's copy he inscribed: "To the Fuhrer with my best wishes and my earnest hopes for a better and lasting understanding between our two countries."
No matter that the drums of war were already starting to roll; that Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland were about to or had already fallen. Londonderry was blind to what Hitler and the Nazis stood for. The Nazis had played him for a fool to gain behind-the-scenes access to the British government. It suited them when they wanted an alliance between the two countries, but when they didn't need him any more, he became an irrelevance.
Londonderry, however, was not alone in misjudging the nature of the beast. Nearly everyone in Britain gave the dictator the benefit of the doubt, hoping that by appeasing whatever his latest demands were, this would placate him and thus ensure peace. One who didn't was Londonderry's cousin, Winston Churchill.
Londonderry at first had trouble renouncing his pro-German stance, particularly when he held views such as this: "Whatever the regime, if it creates efficient organisation, I feel a certain amount of admiration for it, and that is why I respect Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin." However, he wouldn't, he goes on to say, "like to live under those regimes myself".
He could not condone what was happening to the Jews, but then again, they did rather have a lot of power concentrated in their hands, didn't they?
The scales only fell from his eyes as the barbarism, terror and territorial implications of Hitler's reign gained so much strength that it couldn't be ignored or refuted. By then, for Londonderry and his reputation, it was too late.
He had become a defeated man, lord of nothing. He died in 1949 as a new Germany was being reborn from the ashes.