Churchill's Wizards

by Nicholas Rankin

  Delmer did not believe that the Reichstag fire was set by the Communists, as the Nazis said, or by the Nazis themselves, as the Communists said. He thought the lone Dutch eccentric, Marinus van der Lubbe (later executed for the act), was probably responsible. But he was in no doubt that this was exactly the kind of excuse that Hitler needed to strike out against his enemies. Within hours the Communist Party HQ was raided for damning evidence. Communist parliamentarians and trade union leaders were rounded up by the police, along with left-wing doctors, lawyers, writers. On the morning of 28 February 1933, while newspapers blared ‘Communist Plot’ headlines, Hindenburg signed the emergency decree ‘for the Defence of the People and the State’ that Hitler and von Papen placed before him.

  This is when the experiment of the Weimar Republic ends. The decree’s abolition of free speech and the privacy of post and telephone was the death warrant of German democracy and marked the birth of a police state, for the police now had unrestricted right of search, arrest and confiscation. The Nazis had become unstoppable.

  Sefton Delmer met Winston Churchill for the first and only time face to face in March 1933, in the aftermath of the Reichstag fire. As a Tory with Kiplingesque views, Delmer was an enormous admirer of Churchill. Nevertheless their encounter at Lord Beaverbrook’s London home, Stornoway House, was not a success. The Daily Express leader writer, Frank Owen, introduced the two men after dinner. Churchill had a glass of brandy in one hand and a big cigar in the other, and he was red-faced and truculent as he talked with Owen about India. Churchill’s views on India were reactionary and imperialist – he detested Gandhi as ‘a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir’, and once said that Indians were ‘the beastliest people in the world, next to the Germans’. Delmer had no experience of the place, and so stayed silent. Then there came an opportunity. ‘This aspect of the problem, sir,’ he chipped in, ‘is something on which I have frequently heard the views of Adolf Hitler…’ Churchill swung round, anger blazing in his light blue eyes, said, ‘That imposhible fellow Hitler! I don’t want to hear anything about him,’ and stumped off. Delmer thought a statesman should be readier to listen to intelligence, particularly as he knew Churchill had tried unsuccessfully to meet Hitler when he visited Munich the year before. Churchill’s son Randolph had phoned Putzi Hanfstängl to invite him to dinner, but Hitler declined several times. In the end the press officer came alone and was taxed by Churchill about Hitler’s anti-Jewish views. ‘Tell your boss from me,’ said Churchill, ‘that anti-Semitism may be a good starter, but it is a bad sticker.’ After dinner, however, Churchill had asked Hanfstängl quietly what his chief might feel about an alliance between Germany, France and Britain against Russia.

  Sefton Delmer left Germany because Beaverbrook, flattering him that he was the best foreign correspondent the paper had ever had, told him he would need the experience of working in Paris and New York to be truly international. Delmer knew he would miss his contacts in Berlin. Where else could his parrot Popitzschka leave its white droppings down the large dinner jacket of a heartily laughing Hermann Göring? On one of Delmer’s final evenings in Berlin, Ernst Röhm brought Heinrich Himmler to dinner and the subject of concentration camps came up. Joseph Stalin in Russia had already started massively expanding the system of work and prison camps he inherited from the Czars, and Hitler’s regime (aping the Marxists whom in theory they loathed, as Victor Serge has pointed out) was building its own German gulag of concentration camps to deal with the enemy within. Heinrich Himmler was now chief of police in Bavaria and had opened a model institution at a place called Dachau. All those reports of brutalities were complete inventions, he insisted.

  ‘If that is the case,’ said Delmer, ‘why don’t you let me spend a few days there? Let me be treated as an ordinary internee and see what happens to me … What do you say?’

  Himmler said it was a good idea and he would arrange it.

  ‘It is a masterly idea,’ laughed the jovial bully Röhm. ‘We’ll put you through the whole process from the initial beating up to the last bit where you get shot while escaping. Prost!’ And roaring with laughter the guests downed another vodka, though Himmler only raised his glass primly.

  Delmer could see the headline: ‘Delmer in Dachau’. ‘When can we do this, Herr Himmler? Could we make it this weekend?’ Himmler demurred; after Easter would be best. When Delmer telephoned the Tuesday after Easter, an adjutant explained that the visit would have to be postponed because of an outbreak of cholera, and Delmer instantly envisaged a new headline: ‘Cholera in Dachau’. Now the lads in black and brown were actually in power, his credit with them was running out.

  He moved to Paris, but could not escape the pull of German affairs. In June 1934, he was in Venice for the historic first meeting between Hitler and Mussolini. There, he got a tip that Ernst Röhm had quarrelled with Hitler and was now plotting with General Kurt von Schleicher. He flew to London to brief Lord Beaverbrook, who confided that the former German Chancellor, Dr Brüning, had said on a secret visit to London that an attempt would soon be made to oust Hitler and substitute a Conservative government based on the army.

  Delmer went back to Germany after a year away. His successor at the Daily Express Berlin bureau, Pembroke Stephens, had been expelled for finding out too much about Göring’s secret rearmament schemes. The press were regularly shown a pasteboard Reichswehr, disarmed by Versailles, training with dummy tanks and wooden artillery, while the real guns and tanks were hidden. Delmer found that Beaverbrook’s information was essentially correct: von Papen and the conservatives wanted to use Hindenburg and the army to overthrow Hitler and restore the Hohenzollern monarchy. Opposing them was the Göring–Himmler alliance, with Himmler now in control of the SS and the Gestapo. In the middle was Röhm’s troublesome Sturmabteilung (SA, or Storm Troopers). Ernst Röhm wanted his three million brownshirts incorporated into the army under his command, but the army detested this idea as much as it did the homosexual Röhm and his undisciplined storm troopers. The stage was set for a showdown.

  ‘The Night of the Long Knives’, 30 June 1934, is like the scene in classic gangster movies when many scores are settled in one bloodbath. By personally turning on his old friend Röhm, massacring him and the SA leadership, Hitler got rid of a potential rival and at the same time placated the regular armed forces. But General von Schleicher and his wife were shot; so were von Papen’s secretary and speech writer, as a warning to the military of just how ruthless Hitler could be. No one knows exactly how many murders and executions there were, but Sefton Delmer printed a list of 108 names in the Daily Express, and was asked to leave the country by the Gestapo.

  When Hindenburg died on 2 August 1934, Adolf Hitler proclaimed himself Führer und Reichskanzler, effectively making Germany a one-party state under a dictator. From 4–10 September 1934, the NSDAP Reich Party Rally was staged in Nuremberg. It was a big story for the American reporter William L. Shirer, just returned to Germany and shocked by how many free-thinking Germans he had known in Weimar days had become fanatical Nazis. Shirer saw screaming crowds fainting in an almost religious ecstasy at the sight of Hitler. He heard proclamations that the Third Reich would last for a thousand years, listened to the execration of Jews and Bolsheviks, and watched 50,000 members of the new labour corps, the Arbeitdienst, doing military drill with shining spades instead of the guns denied them by the Versailles Treaty. Shirer hated – but was awed by – the way hysteria and joy could be induced in half a million people.

  Dudley Clarke was also on the streets of Nuremberg that September, visiting Germany in the long vacation of his second year at the Army Staff College in Camberley. He too was impressed by how the Nazis marshalled people – nearly 500 trains bringing in Party officials, the SS and the SA, the Labour Corps and the Hitler Youth from all over the country. He watched Hitler pass by ‘standing up in a big Mercedes car going very fast and flanked on each side by car-loads of body-guards, alternatively driving past or falling back so that it
would be almost impossible for a marksman on either side to get in a shot’. Leni Riefenstahl captured the drive-by sequence in Triumph das Willens or Triumph of the Will, her second attempt to film the Nazi party Nuremberg rally. She used a huge crew of 170 this time and multiple camera angles, cutting the choreographed conformity to create the ultimate Nazi propaganda film, where no one was out of step. Her earlier film had the embarrassment of the fat, sweaty, scarred figure of Ernst Röhm, now a non-person. The penultimate chunk of the new film was given over to a huge parade of SA men listening to Hitler’s speech absolving them of blame for the ‘dark shadow’ of Röhm. At the end of the rally Rudolf Hess shouted ‘The Party is Hitler, and Hitler is Germany, just as Germany is Hitler!’

  Triumph of the Will, staged like a pseudo-religious Busby Berkeley movie within a huge set built by Albert Speer on the Nuremberg Zeppelin Field, had its glittering premiere at Berlin’s Ufa-Palast am Zoo on 28 March 1935. It is Leni Riefenstahl’s love song to Adolf Hitler, and a masterpiece of propaganda. Earlier that month, the Nazis defiantly tore up the Versailles Treaty’s military restrictions. Germany revealed an air force equal to Britain’s, and announced compulsory military service.

  Even when he was covering the Spanish Civil War in 1936–7, Sefton Delmer could never quite escape the Germans, who were secretly assisting the rebel Nationalists, Generals Franco and Mola. Delmer had set out for Spain from Paris in his Ford V8 convertible (together with his typewriter, his wife Isabel, her paints and easel and their Siamese cat, Pilbul) the day after Franco announced his right-wing rebellion against the left-wing Spanish Republic in July 1936. At first, Delmer covered the campaign of Mola’s Nationalists. He saw burnt-out vehicles, charred corpses and blasted body parts littering the Somosierra pass, white-faced trembling prisoners being led off to be shot, and the looting of San Sebastian and Irún. But he was soon expelled, because the Germans were coming. The Nationalists thought he was a British spy; they did not want an expert on Germany like him around when the German Condor Legion secretly landed, in defiance of Non-Intervention.

  When Delmer arrived in Madrid by bus to report from the other, Republican, side at the beginning of the winter of 1936, the elected Republican government had fled to Valencia, and Madrid was waging its own exhilarating fight for survival against Franco’s Nationalists, who were besieging the city. Once again Delmer was seen as suspect, for the opposite reasons: he knew personally the Führer whose air force planes had just begun dropping bombs on the Spanish capital. ‘He’s a bloody Nazi,’ said one zealot in the International Brigades. Another Briton, who knew just how generous Delmer was with food, drink, cigarettes and money to the Brigadistas, replied: ‘If you’re a good Communist, I’d sooner be a bloody Nazi like him.’

  Delmer moved early in 1937 into the Hotel Florida overlooking the Plaza Callao in the Gran Via, ‘the friendliest, funniest, and most adventure-laden Hotel in which I have ever stayed’. In the bathroom Delmer installed a bar which he stocked with looted wine and spirits from King Alfonso XIII’s cellar, purchased cheap from an Anarchist pub off the Puerta de Sol. Delmer liked to drink, though only after he had done his work. The American reporter Virginia Cowles remembered the Hotel Florida as a multinational haunt of ‘idealists and mercenaries; scoundrels and martyrs; adventurers and embusqués; fanatics, traitors and plain down-and-outs’, many of them in Tom’s room with its electric burners and chafing dishes, a ham hanging from a coat-hanger, a litter of sardine tins and packets of crackers. The press who gathered there after eleven at night when they had finished the long wait to file their stories by phone from the Telefonica, the tallest building in Madrid, included Ernest Hemingway of the North American Newspaper Alliance and Martha Gellhorn of Collier’s. When it was hot, Delmer would switch the light out and open the windows and play Beethoven’s Fifth on his wind-up gramophone. The parties would go on till two or three in the morning, but they all ended when the room, luckily empty, was pulverised by a shell.

  Delmer was putting on weight again after losing two stone at a German spa, and described himself as

  a kind of grinning fat boy of the Lower Fifth, in the dirtiest of shrunken and frayed grey flannels, a soup stained brown leather jacket over a khaki shirt and, if the sun warranted it, a wide brimmed straw hat on my head, of the kind worn by the Provençal peasants around Arles where I bought it.

  This garb annoyed Constancia de la Mora in the Foreign Press Office who thought his scruffiness showed disrespect for the Spanish Republic. In her memoirs she said no one liked or trusted the Daily Express man, and she clearly did not share his sense of humour: ‘Delmer always talked and behaved as though the Spanish were some tribe of strange and ignorant savages caught up in some absurd and primitive battle with bows and arrows.’

  Sefton Delmer was honest enough to admit that he never saw the Nazi–Soviet pact coming. When he went to Russia with a British trade delegation in late March 1939, he misread the Soviet Union, whose chaotic muddle and inefficiency led him to believe it could neither fight nor supply its armed forces. The cynical Non-Aggression Treaty between Germany and the USSR on 23 August 1939 took Britain and France by surprise and doomed Poland. German troops invaded from one side on 1 September and a fortnight later Russians from the other. The Gestapo joined hands with OGPU, the forerunner of the KGB; as Evelyn Waugh wrote, ‘east and west the prisoners rolled away to slavery’.

  For Delmer the best thing about his Russian trip was that on the train journey from Warsaw to Moscow he made friends with the reporter representing The Times, a tall debonair type with a broken nose, whose name was Ian Fleming. The two journalists shared a suite at the National, the antique Intourist hotel opposite the Kremlin, drank vodka martinis and picked up a couple of girls from Odessa. It was through Fleming that Sefton Delmer would find his central role in political warfare and black propaganda when war broke out.

  13

  Curtain Up

  Clare Hollingworth always wanted to get away. The woman who became the doyenne of the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents’ Club determined early to escape from conventional Leicestershire to see the reality of the foreign lands whose maps she had clipped out from WW1 newspapers as a small child. She left the world of point-to-points and hunt balls first for Slavonic Studies at London University under Professor R. W. Seton-Watson (who had been a key figure in propaganda for Crewe House in WW1), and then to work for the League of Nations Union. She was 27 years old when she was hired in 1939 by the editor of the Daily Telegraph in Fleet Street to go as a correspondent to Poland, where she had previously worked in Warsaw and Katowice, helping refugees from Nazi Germany to get visas to escape. The Continent was on the cusp of another war, and Hollingworth’s first professional newspaper assignment was about to get her one of the scoops of the century. With brand-new luggage from Harrods, she flew out the next morning from Hendon Airport to Warsaw, via Berlin.

  It was Saturday, 26 August 1939, twenty-five years to the day since the British Expeditionary Force, retreating from Mons at the start of WW1, had briefly held up the invading Germans at the Battle of Le Cateau. It was also the anniversary of Crécy, one of the many battlefields to which Clare Hollingworth’s father had taken her as a girl, and John Buchan’s 64th, and last, birthday.

  Berlin was the destination marked on the shabbier luggage of another passenger leaving London that day, on the boat-train from Victoria. ‘Berlin?’ remarked his chatty railway porter. ‘Rum place to be going right now.’ The owner of the cases, who bore a razor scar the colour of raw pork looping from his right ear to his mouth, was the fascist William Joyce, on his way to becoming the Nazi broadcaster nicknamed ‘Lord Haw-Haw’. The Irishman was one jump ahead of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch, taking the ferry to Ostend.

  Clare’s flight to Warsaw took six hours. Noel Coward had flown the same route two months before. The entertainer had somehow imagined Warsaw as grey-stoned, medieval, twisting, but found it flat, wide and yellowish. He stayed at the Europejski Hotel, across the s
quare from the impressive and well-guarded Polish Foreign Ministry building. In the same hotel, tiny Clare now met the Daily Telegraph’s man in the Polish capital, Hugh Carleton Greene, the younger brother of the novelist Graham Greene and a future director general of the BBC. Tall, thin, shambling Greene was a fluent German speaker who had been expelled as a correspondent from Berlin after ten years. He had visited Dachau concentration camp in 1933 and found the guards more criminal and brutal than their Communist prisoners. ‘One of us has got to go to the border,’ he said. Clare volunteered to take the train south to the German frontier. At railway stations along the line officials were posting notices of the mobilisation of the Polish Army.

  Back in Katowice again she borrowed the official car of her friend the British Consul General, and the Union Jack fluttering from its bonnet helped her cross the closed frontier at Beuthen. Inside German Silesia she bought newspapers, aspirin, film, electric torches and bottles of wine, which were hard to obtain in Poland. She was driving back along the fortified frontier road towards Gleiwitz, the last town in Germany, when sixty-five military motorcycle dispatch riders, bunched together, overtook her. As she drove up a hillside towards the frontier, she found tarpaulins and screens of hessian erected along the road, concealing the valley on her left from view. But the wind blew on the afternoon of 29 August 1939 and lifted the curtain. Through the hole in the hide, the reporter Clare Hollingworth saw with her own eyes scores of German tanks lined up, ready to invade Poland.

  Adolf Hitler told the commanders of his armed forces at Obersalzburg on 22 August: ‘I shall supply a propaganda justification to bring about hostilities. It is of little consequence whether the reasons are believed. No one asks the victor whether he has told the truth.’