As the election campaign approached its climax the Nazis, needing money, sought it from the titans of German industry. Göring invited them to the Präsidentenpalast—to respecters of Autorität the invitation had the force of a command—and on arrival they were seated in carefully arranged armchairs, with Gustav Krupp von Bohlen in the place of honor and four I. G. Farben directors immediately behind him. Hitler entered and faced them. “We are about to hold the last election,” he began and paused to let the full implications of that sink in. Naturally, he said, the transition to National Socialism would be smoother if the party was swept in by a landslide. Therefore, he solicited their support. In backing a dictatorship they would be backing themselves: “Private enterprise cannot be maintained in a democracy.” Using his “authority and personality,” he assured them, he would not only eliminate the Communist threat; he would abolish the trade unions and restore the Wehrmacht to its former glory. “Regardless of the outcome” at the polls, there would be “no retreat.” If he lost he would stay in office “by other means… with other weapons.” The chancellor sat down and Krupp sprang up to express “the unanimous feeling of the industrialists in support of the chancellor.” Göring reminded them of the point of the meeting. Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, the Nazi financial wizard, cried more bluntly: “And now, gentlemen, pony up!” Once again Krupp, as senior man, rose to pledge a million marks, and Schacht collected two million more from the others.42
Financed by German industrialists, Hitler led the bloodiest election campaign in European history. Every night trucks bearing squads of brown-shirted storm troopers thundered down streets and alleys all over the country, breaking down doors, dragging away their critics to be beaten and tortured. Bonfires blazed on hilltops and the storm troopers held torchlight parades, singing the party anthem. By day other party columns marched down thoroughfares, public address loudspeakers brayed martial music. Billboards were plastered with Nazi posters. Swastikas decorated telegraph poles.
It worked. The Nazis polled 17,277,180 votes; the Social Democrats 7,181,629. With the support of sympathetic nationalist deputies, Hitler could muster an absolute majority in the Reichstag. He needed more than that, however. His immediate goal was passage of an enabling act giving him dictatorial powers. Only a constitutional amendment could grant that, and amendments required two-thirds of the deputies. To the new chancellor, this presented no obvious problem; armed with his extraordinary decree, he could bar opposition deputies from entering Reichstag sessions, or, if they became unruly, arrest them.
But Hitler, though evil, was an evil genius; he recognized the necessity of mollifying the old Wilhelmine order, particularly the officer corps. If they backed him, the country would feel a sense of continuity, strengthening the impression of Nazi legitimacy. Thus he announced that the Third Reich’s first Reichstag would convene in Potsdam’s Garrison Church, the very temple of Prussianism, where the Hohenzollern sovereigns had prayed and Frederick the Great lay buried. He turned the session into an obsequious tribute to Hindenburg. André François-Poncet, the French ambassador, wrote that after this performance, “how could… the Junkers and monarchist barons… hesitate to grant him their entire confidence, to meet all his requests, to concede the full powers he claimed?”43
Two days later, in the Kroll Opera House in Berlin, the Reichstag voted 444 to 84 to give Hitler his dictatorial powers. The Enabling Act of March 23, 1933, transferred from the deputies to their chancellor the powers to make laws, control the budget, ratify treaties with foreign countries, and initial constitutional amendments. Thus ended the fourteen-year German republic. Autorität had been punctiliously observed every step along the way. “It was no victory,” wrote Spengler, “for enemies were lacking.”44
In one of his more magnanimous moments, Churchill said of the Reich’s future führer: “I admire men who stand up for their country in defeat, even though I am on the other side.” Hitler, he added, had “a perfect right to be a patriotic German if he chose.” Winston’s son, Randolph, then a journalist, had accompanied the Nazi leader during his first, peaceful 1932 campaign, and later, when the returns showed a sharp increase in Nazi voters, Randolph had sent him a telegram of congratulation. His father, however, was less enthusiastic now. In Hitler’s speeches, The Times had reported, he was demanding Wehrfreiheit (military freedom), a euphemism for German rearmament. Many MPs thought he might have a point, that Wehrfreiheit was worth discussing. In May 1932 Churchill asked them: “Do you wish for war?” Two months later he declined to join those acclaiming the Lausanne Conference, which had virtually ended reparations. How, he wondered, would Germany spend the money she owed the Allies? He felt apprehensive. Germany might rearm, he said, and cited a recent warlike statement by Hitler, “who is the moving impulse behind the German government and may be more than that soon.”45
Churchill and Hitler almost met. Although still shaky from his New York automobile accident, Winston was moving ahead in mid-1932 with the research for his biography of his great ancestor, the first Duke of Marlborough. In the summer of 1932, he and a small entourage of friends and relatives toured Marlborough’s old battlefields on the Continent. After a day on the field at Blenheim, he rested in Munich’s Regina Hotel. The Nazis were, of course, aware that he was in the country. Inevitably, the Churchill party was approached, and their envoy was skillfully chosen. Ernst (“Putzi”) Hanfstaengl was a Harvard graduate, a friend of Randolph’s, and the millionaire son of a German father and a wealthy American mother. He was also the man who had given Hitler asylum after the aborted Nazi putsch of 1923. Putzi joined the Englishmen for cocktails. After he had played some of Churchill’s favorite tunes on a lobby piano, they dined together.
The issue of German politics was raised almost immediately. Putzi offered to introduce Winston to his idol. Nothing would be easier, he said; Hitler came to the hotel every evening at five o’clock and would be delighted to meet so great a British statesman. It was all arranged, and then Churchill disarranged it. He asked Hanfstaengl: “Why is your chief so violent about the Jews? I can quite understand being angry with Jews who have done wrong or who 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? Tell your boss for me that anti-Semitism may be a good starter, but it is a bad stayer.”
Putzi’s face fell. The next day he solemnly informed Winston that the meeting was off; Hitler had other plans. Since Churchill and his party remained at the Regina for a full week with no further overtures, he concluded that his disapproval of Nazi anti-Semitism had blacklisted him. So it had, but the story has an interesting envoi. Hitler had told Hanfstaengl: “In any case, what part does Churchill play? He is in the opposition and no one pays any attention to him.” Putzi shot back: “People said the same thing about you.” For this and other flippancies, Putzi, who had not only sheltered Hitler but had also given generously to his war chests, would later flee for his life, thus joining the extraordinary exodus from Germany of the blameless and the gifted. Hitler, in effect, exiled German intellectual life. During his first year in power he drove 1,600 scholars out of the country, including a quarter of the Heidelberg faculty and five Nobel laureates.46
In Parliament Churchill continued to urge revision of Versailles but vehemently opposed Wehrfreiheit, warning that accepting equality of armaments “would be almost to appoint the day for another European war—to fix it as if it were a prize-fight.” Sounding the alarm even before Hitler moved into the chancellery, he wrote in the Daily Mail on October 17, 1932, that General Schleicher had “already declared that whatever the Powers may settle, Germany will do what she thinks fit in rearmament. Very grave dangers lie along these paths, and if Great Britain… encouraged Germany in such adventures, we might in an incredibly short space of time [be] plunged into a situation of violent peril.” He told the House: “Now the demand is that Germany should be allowed to rearm.
Do not delude yourselves. Do not let His Majesty’s Government believe—I am sure they do not believe—that all that Germany is asking for is equal status…. That is not what Germany is seeking. All these bands of sturdy Teutonic youths, marching through the streets and roads of Germany, with the light of desire in their eyes… are not looking for status. They are looking for weapons.”47
Perhaps nothing underscores the difference between German and British moods in the early 1930s so starkly as the political activities of their university undergraduates. In Oxford they were vowing never to fight, even in defense of England, while in Heidelberg, H. R. Knickerbocker of the New York Evening Post found, nearly three out of every four students were dues-paying Nazis. A German historian points out that Heidelberg, like Oxford, had preserved its “traditionalist, socially exclusive structure,” but that the German youths from privileged families were suppressing student groups supporting the republic in Berlin by “a powerful union of nationalist, völkisch-oriented, and above all dueling fraternities.” They campaigned strenuously against what they called the “Jewification” of the universities. Weimar’s Ministry of Culture tried to end discrimination against “non-Aryan” undergraduates, but this merely brought “a further radicalization, increasing disorders and a further growth of National Socialist propaganda.” Even “the majority of German writers,” according to Günter Grass, “made no attempt to defend the republic, while not a few of them deliberately held it up to ridicule.”48
The rightward drift in academe and the intellectual community was of profound significance. In Germany, as in England, most undergraduates came from upper-class families. Because their commitment to National Socialism was often decisive in determining parental commitment, the trend toward the hakenkreuz enlisted the lives, the fortunes, and the sacred honor of the country’s traditional ruling oligarchies, including their children, who would inherit tomorrow’s Germany.
Meantime, the Oxford Union’s resolution that it would “in no circumstances fight for King and Country” had aroused Churchill’s wrath. He called it an “abject, squalid, shameless avowal,” a “very disquieting and disgusting symptom.” Its impact abroad, he said, would be disastrous. He thought “of Germany, with its splendid clear-eyed youth marching forward… burning to suffer and die for their fatherland,” and of “Italy, with her ardent Fascisti.” He said: “One can almost feel the curl of contempt upon the lips of the manhood of all these peoples when they read this message sent out by Oxford University in the name of young England.”49
In early 1934 Oxford’s Tories invited him to speak, and he accepted—unwisely, for it was impossible for him to force entry into the locked minds of British undergraduates in the early 1930s; earlier, the Cambridge Union had voted 213 to 138 for “uncompromising” pacifism. But he couldn’t resist a fight. He agreed to appear and answer twelve prepared questions. That part of the evening went well. It was afterward, during a general discussion, that he ran into trouble. Among the five hundred students present was a German Rhodes scholar, Adolf Schlepegrell. Schlepegrell pointed out that Versailles had specified a Saar plebiscite, scheduled for 1935, to determine whether it would join France or Germany. Since the population was German, the results were a foregone conclusion. Schlepegrell suggested a generous gesture—an immediate withdrawal of French troops stationed there. Churchill, in his most combative mood, rejected the idea. Germany must abide by the letter of Versailles, he said, because she “started the war,” thereby “plunging the whole world into ruins.” The young German quickly asked: “Does Mr. Churchill believe that the German people, the men and women who live in Germany today, are responsible for the war? Would he please answer ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ ” Winston looked straight at him and replied: “Yes.” The youth bowed to him and, amid tremendous applause from his fellow students, walked out of the hall.50
Ironically, when Schlepegrell returned to Germany—where he had become a newspaper hero—the authorities found that one of his grandmothers had been Jewish, and this disqualified him from taking a bar examination. Eventually he became a naturalized British citizen and served as a political intelligence officer during World War II. So Churchill won in the end. But that sequel lay in the future, unknown, on that evening when he walked out on Winston and humiliated him in the eyes of Oxford. Nor was that all. Later in the discussion, after the German’s departure, Churchill declared British rearmament “essential for us to be safe in our island home,” and the audience, to his surprise and consternation, burst into laughter. He repeated the phrase, and the laughter grew so raucous, and so prolonged, that he could not continue.51
A half-century later their mirth seems incomprehensible. Yet how could a generation informed by Journey’s End and All Quiet on the Western Front have responded differently? They believed that Churchill was crying wolf. And they knew his alarm was groundless. As the new year arrived, a catchy tune from Walt Disney’s Three Little Pigs was on everyone’s lips:
Who’s a-fraid of the big bad wolf, big bad wolf, big bad wolf?
Who’s a-fraid of the big bad wolf? Tra la la la la!
ONE
SHOALS
NUMBER 10 Downing Street, at that time the most famous address in the world, is one of three gracious seventeenth-century houses built by George Downing, a Harvard man who returned to the country of his birth, became a Cromwellian civil servant, and designed No. 10, No. 11, and No. 12 as “large and well-built houses, fit for persons of honour and quality, each house to have a pleasant prospect into St. James’s Park.” Originally the properties of the Earl of Lichfield, they passed into royal hands when his lordship was undone by reckless gambling.1
Not all of No. 10’s subsequent occupants were people of quality. King Charles II, the most promiscuous of the Stuarts, used it to house his kept women, who, when neglected by him, solicited passersby from windows and charged them fees. In 1732 King George II presented the building to Sir Robert Walpole, Britain’s first prime minister, and ever since then it has been the London home of his successors (except Lord Salisbury, who preferred to live in his magnificent London mansion), just as No. 11 is the residence of the chancellor of the Exchequer and No. 12 the workplace of government whips. Because Walpole was also responsible for the kingdom’s money, the front door of No. 10 bears a worn brass plate reading: “First Lord of the Treasury.”2
If, during Churchill’s last years as tenant, you were a young American foreign correspondent bearing an invitation to call here, that plate was the first thing you would have seen after the bobby at the door confirmed your appointment and checked your identity. Inside, on the ground floor, the house at first appeared to be, not the teeming hive of a world leader, but a lovely, somewhat quaint relic of the Restoration. Jock Colville has recalled that in the 1930s the atmosphere was that of any other comfortable upper-class London home, and that even after the outbreak of World War II Neville Chamberlain “disliked being disturbed, telephonically or otherwise, at weekends or after dinner at 10 Downing Street.” But in some respects appearances were deceptive. There was more to No. 10 than at first met the eye—tunnels linked the building with No. 11 and No. 12, and the rear of No. 10 joined the much larger Lichfield House, another possession which became crown property when the cards turned against the unlucky Lichfield.3
State rooms occupied the floor above, and a creaking old elevator led to the top floor, where the prime minister and his wife lived in guarded privacy. Most intriguing, however, for one who cherished the past, was the Cabinet Room on the ground floor. Outside, a row of coat pegs bore the names of the cabinet ministers, and a dapper man in striped trousers checked the P.M.’s appointments and studied documents from institutions responsible to No. 10’s householder—that morning the documents came from, among others, the British Museum, the Church of England, and the ancient universities. Baize double doors led to the elegant cabinet chamber, centered around a dark, gleaming table. A secretary sat at a Victorian desk near the door; tall, well-proportioned windows overlooked the
Horse Guards. The cabinet met at 11:00 A.M. on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but its members waited outside until the prime minister, seated with the secretary to the cabinet beside him, summoned them.4
Winston had first occupied a minister’s chair at this table in 1908, at the age of thirty-three, when the entire world awaited decisions made here, and the future of millions, living in British possessions which most ministers hadn’t even seen, depended on their judgments. In the last quarter of the twentieth century the greatness of the British Empire is a memory shared by a fraction of the population. The world was very different in 1932. Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union was a superpower. Powerful armies were found elsewhere, but Britannia continued to rule the world’s waves, and her imperial resources were almost inexhaustible. The roar of the British lion was still deafening—not only in Europe, but in every time zone. In the aftermath of Waterloo an English journalist first observed that “the sun never sets upon the Union Jack.” That was still true in the twenty-one-year interwar period which followed the Armistice of 1918, when decisions around this table, counterpoised with those made in Berlin’s Reich Chancellery, profoundly altered the course of history.
Over the centuries No. 10 has been the home of men whose luster was not limited to Britain and whose names are household words, among them Chatham, Pitt, Melbourne, Peel, Palmerston, Disraeli, Gladstone, and Lloyd George. Although he had earlier been regarded as a future prime minister, during the 1930s Fleet Street saw Churchill as a wine which had passed its point. Still vigorous, still brilliant, he was nevertheless out of tune with the times. He was distrusted, disliked—even hated—by those who did not share his conviction that Germany threatened the peace and England must arm to defend her shores. The leaders of England’s three political parties were convinced that Hitler would never make war if his demands were met with diplomatic finesse. In those years, when Britain was losing her eminence as the world’s mightiest power, Churchill was pitted against three tenants of No. 10 whom Englishmen would prefer to forget, three political mediocrities who presided over disastrous policies which reduced Britannia to an embattled island struggling to survive—a struggle that only Churchill and his small band of followers, who would finally succeed them on the first stroke of twelve, believed could be won.