After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  The historians who, in the postwar period, began to try to make sense of what had happened, to plumb its unfathomable blackened depths, tended at first to fall into two categories, whom one could call the ideologues and the diplomats. For the ideologues, the Spanish Civil War was the beginning, properly speaking, of the great European War. On the one hand there were the forces of the soft, or liberal, Left, the elected government of the Spanish Republic, represented by the president, Manuel Azanã, and Dr Juan Negrín, an internationally esteemed professor and psychologist from the university of Madrid. For many of all shades of leftish opinion, ranged from the Liberal party in Britain to the extreme anarchists and communists, their fight was seen to be with the forces of fascism, as represented by Mussolini, and its more sinister Hitlerite manifestations in Germany. Behind the Republic – if you were against it – you could see the blood-curdling faces who had so alarmed Burke when he reflected upon the French Revolution 140 years earlier, figures such as the lovely Dolores la Sardinera, a great orator and Stalinist, said to have cut a priest’s throat with her own teeth.8 Behind these people were the actual armaments of the Soviet Union. Stalin saw the civil war as a chance not only to spread communism, but to win allies in the field against Germany, should that conflict come.9 Russia sent over 75,000 tons of oil to Spain between August and October 1935; it sent fighter planes – the I-15 biplane known as the ‘Chato’ or ‘snubnose’ and the Mosca; as well as machine guns, bombers, faster than and technically superior to the German ones sent to the rebels. On the other side, the ideologues saw Franco as the defender of Old Europe against communism. He united the swashbuckling, appallingly brutal Carlist mainly northern forces, who supported one branch of the deposed royal family, with the fascist Falangists, and to do his brutal work he enlisted the help of Italian and German troops, aircraft and armaments. Anthony Powell, destined to chronicle English upper-class Bohemia in this period in his unforgettable novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time, well summed up the all but apolitical right-wing position at the time: ‘My position on the Spanish War was that people should mind their own business. Much against my taste I should have been for Franco in preference to a Left [Government] dominated by Communists. It seems now clear [he was writing in April 1992] that had Franco not won, the Communists would have dominated Spain, there would have been a Europe “Red at each end”, in 1939 Spain, like Russia, would have come in on the Nazi side and we should have been in a very ticklish situation.’10

  For those more ideologically engaged than Powell, Spain was the chance to go and fight for an idea: an idea of how the human race in Europe should be governed. It was the closest thing since the Thirty Years War to an all-out ideological conflict. Some 40,000 non-Spanish nationals fought for the Republic, never more than 18,000 at any one time.11 Most of them were French, but there were some 5,000 German leftists, fewer than 3,000 Americans and some 2,000 from Britain, of whom 500 were killed and 1,200 wounded.12 General Franco also had his ideological supporters – White Russians, the Romanian Iron Guard, or the 670-strong Irish Brigade, mainly drawn from rural Ireland and West Belfast, some but not all members of the Irish fascist organization the Blueshirts. Their contribution was not always as useful to Franco as he might have hoped when he laid on the cardinal primate of Spain to greet their arrival. On the station platform at Salamanca, in whose town hall they had been entertained perhaps too lavishly, the band struck up the Irish national anthem. One Irish soldier, ‘drunk as a coot’, leant out of a window of the train and vomited down the neck of a general who remained ramrod straight and unmoving throughout.13 Other English-speaking Franco-ites included Peter Kemp, a twenty-year-old Cambridge graduate, whose motives seem to have been a mixture of anarchism, toryism, and wanting an adventure. In spite of being a Protestant (‘I shit on Englishmen’, his first commander told him bluntly), he found the Foreign Legion to be full of superb soldiers. The brutality of the Carlists disgusted him; he was wounded badly in the jaw, but went on to have a ‘good’ Second World War, being parachuted into France for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE), as well as organizing anti-fascist partisans in Albania and fighting with the Polish home army. Another Second World War hero, Frank Thomas, who was wounded at Tobruk, was the son of a food wholesaler in Cardiff. A convinced fascist, he fought in most of the major battles around Madrid. He saw appallingly brutal behaviour on both sides, but hated the Falangists. The brutality of the republicans he considered even worse. Franco, he said, ‘put many captured members of the International Brigade safely over the French frontier with a new suit of clothes and five pounds in their pockets’.14

  The difficulty for the historians who interpret the Second World War as a pure continuation of ideological battles first fought out in Spain is that none of the major controllers of Europe’s ‘destiny’ neatly fit the pigeon-holes of their ideological followers. If the Second World War was fought ‘against fascism’, then the ambivalence of the Soviet Union, and of its fellow travellers in France and Britain, makes no sense, since once Hitler and Stalin had formed their Axis, for purely cynical and non-ideological reasons, the whole war against fascism ideals collapsed. Franco, whether you abominate his memory, idolize him, or wish, like Anthony Powell, to keep out of the conflict, manifestly was fighting for a set of ideas – namely Catholic conservatism, enforced by military dictatorship. This was rather different in many respects from fascism proper, not least in its overt desire to submit to the authority of the Church rather than, as Mussolini and Hitler did, hide from the Church’s followers the full extent of their profound hostility to the Christian idea.

  So, the Second World War cannot be said to have started for ideological reasons.

  Yet Hitler’s anti-Semitism surely did play a part in the change of British public perception of the whole European situation. Many of the 70,000 of those Jews (55,00015 of whom settled permanently) who came to Britain as a result of Hitler’s persecutions were to become household names, like Karl Popper, Nikolaus Pevsner, Georg Solti, Geoffrey Elton. Others were household names already. When Sigmund Freud arrived, all the rules were bent, and he was made a British citizen the very next day.16 Apart from enriching life in innumerable ways for the British, their very presence prompted the questions in the mind which would lead to something much deeper than questions of mere national interest. What kind of a world would it be, if it were controlled by a régime that wanted to expunge Albert Einstein and Yehudi Menuhin? Those who came often did so shyly, aware of their German-ness more than their Jewishness.

  ‘Where are you from?’ Eva Neurach was asked shortly after arriving in England.

  ‘Berlin,’ she told the lady who had enquired.

  ‘Ah, well, never mind,’ was the reply.17

  The more Hitler triumphed, taking over first one territory then another, the more he and his henchmen dared to increase their persecution of the Jews. Between April and November 1938 alone 4,000 businesses were simply appropriated from their Jewish owners. At about the same time, 500 Jews were sent to Buchenwald, and were packed into a sheep barn so tightly that within two months 150 of them were dead. In Hamburg there were public auctions of stolen Jewish property, at which patriots were encouraged to come along and ‘buy’ pillaged property. There was frequent talk now from Goebbels, Goring, Hitler and Himmler of expelling all the Jews from Germany, and to speed them on their way they were forbidden to attend concerts, theatres, cinemas. In November 1938 the Gestapo planned a further ‘sharp measure’. Instructions were given to the police in all areas that there was to be a violent strike against Jewish property. They must not attempt in any area of Germany to prevent Jewish houses or properties being destroyed. Synagogues were to be torched. Between 20,000 and 30,000 Jews were to be arrested and paraded through the streets, following the night known as Kristallnacht, Crystal Night. The next morning, newspapers instructed by Dr Goebbels proudly announced that ‘not a hair was touched of a Jew’s head’ – totally untrue – in the night of destruction, designed to make J
ews simply want to leave their country.18

  The British Consul-General in Frankfurt am Main wrote:

  Recent events have revealed to me a facet of the German character which I had not suspected. They seemed to me to have no cruelty in their make-up. They are habitually kind to animals, to children, to the aged and the infirm. The explanation of the outbreak of sadistic cruelty may be that sexual perversion, and in particular homosexuality, are very prevalent in Germany. It seems to me that mass sexual perversity may offer an explanation for this otherwise inexplicable outbreak. I am persuaded that, if the Government of Germany depended on the suffrage of the people, those in power and responsible for those outrages would be swept away by a storm of indignation if not put up against a wall and shot.19

  This is not as naive as it seems. The majority of Germans almost certainly did abhor the Nazi atrocities against the Jews, even when they remained (compared with the horrors which were to come) at the comparatively unmurderous level of bullying, theft, arson and intimidation. Very many Germans by this date realized that they had been duped by the National Socialists, but it took a particular kind of courage to stand up against them, and without international support, what would such ‘standing up’ have done? Only the army could ever have conducted an internal putsch against Hitler, and that did not happen until later.

  While it is right, then, to say that when war came it was not a crusade waged on behalf of the Jews, it was nevertheless true that the organized thuggery, the state-sponsored criminality of the Third Reich did shock the world. It undoubtedly played its role in changing British resolves, in startling the British public out of one state of mind – ecstatic gratitude in autumn 1938 that war had been averted – into a grim knowledge, by September 1939, that Hitler must be got rid of. One psephological statistic and one anecdote would confirm this generalized impression. The statistic: the British Union of Fascists was not by definition an anti-Semitic organization, and its leadership always claimed to repudiate personal antipathy to Jews. But this was casuistry. The rank and file liked to tramp through the East End of London chanting: ‘The Yids, the Yids, we’ve got to get rid of the Yids.’ They killed no Jews, but they created terror in poorer Jewish districts. They exchanged with one another the valediction ‘P.J.’ or ‘Perish Judah!’20 The more anti-Semitic they became, the lower their percentage of the vote when it came to local elections. Unlike the Communists, who at least won four parliamentary seats, the Fascists never won any seat in the House of Commons, and by 1939 their share of votes in local elections had fallen even in parts of London where they were popular. This in spite of the earlier popularity of Mosley. A generalized feeling of disgust at the thuggery of the Mosleyites, and in particular distaste for their overt anti-Semitism, surely played a part in this.

  Secondly, an anecdote. Before an English person narrates such a story, it is perhaps worth saying that, of course, the whole climate of opinion has altered in the years since the Second World War. What is now called ‘political correctness’ was unknown, as was the Race Relations industry. Throughout the British Empire, an effectual apartheid operated which was social as much as racial. (Indian and Malay princes were treated like white men.) Ordinary ‘natives’, whether Indian, Malay or Chinese, or African, were not educated at the same schools, or entertained at the same restaurants and clubs as Europeans. In the United States, blacks and whites were still segregated in all the southern states, and for social purposes in the northern ones too. These things, to those who live in a post-Nazi era, strike us as bizarre, as well as distasteful. I repeat my anecdote in the consciousness that it will sound smug, but I am sure it is true. It was told me by one of the soldiers in the prisoner-of-war camp where it happened, and I am sure that every one of those soldiers – certainly the one who told it me – would have been ‘politically incorrect’, made jokes which would sound to us racist, or very likely raised an eyebrow if an Indian was offered a drink at the bar, or a Jew proposed for the golf club. I tell the story not to suggest that the British were saints and the Germans all sinners, but to suggest that there was a strong sense of decency in these men; and they were aware, long before the Holocaust began, and long before the full extent of the atrocities had been revealed, that Hitler had crossed the bounds of decency.

  When the young John Buxton, a minor poet, was taken prisoner by the Germans in 1940, he found himself in a PoW camp with several hundred other British troops. On their first evening, the British sergeant-major was called to be interviewed by the camp commandant, who turned out to be a polite army officer, not SS, not a criminal. The German commandant apologized, in civilized tones, for the nature of his request, but he wanted the British to tell him the number of Jews in their unit. He suggested that the following morning when the men were lined up on parade, the sergeant-major should ask the Jews present to take three paces forward. Nothing would happen to the Jews, the German promised. It was purely for administrative purposes that the authorities wished to know.

  The next morning, several hundred British PoWs lined up in the yard of the camp. The RSM bellowed: ‘All those who are Jews, three paces forward.’ Every British man present stepped forward.21 Innumerable instances of British anti-Semitism can be adduced before, during and after the Second World War, but this story suggests a generalized horror at the meanness inherent in racialism or religious prejudice, and which certainly made most British people respond with steel resolve when the call to arms eventually came.

  As with Churchill’s conversion to the Republican cause in Spain (‘I am English, and I prefer the triumph of the wrong cause’), the diplomatic and political reasons for the inexorable progress towards war were incoherent, even self-contradictory. Of course, the revisionist historians have much right on their side when they argue that it was not ‘in British interests’ to stop Hitler invading this or that patch of earth far from home. And they were right to say that the Second World War broke Britain, destroyed it more surely than it destroyed her enemies, broke, by its ‘finest hour’, the very core of the mother country and of its Empire. But there was a fittingness in the incoherence, a rightness in the wrongness which was deeper and ultimately more satisfactory than any coherent strategy could have been. The sad, dangerous and well-calculated situation changed and became tragic, and thereby human.

  The League of Nations, which had been started at the behest of an American president, but never joined by the United States, was powerless against the Japanese when they invaded Manchuria in 1931, powerless against Italy when it attacked Abyssinia, powerless against Germany in its territorial expansionist triumphs. As soon as Hitler came to power in 1933, he withdrew from the League. Japan left it the same year. Italy followed suit in 1937. The only ‘policemen’ left in the world to stand up to those nations who were abusing their power, and threatening other nations’ borders, were other great powers: the USSR, France, Great Britain and the United States. In History-as-Mythology, the mid-to-late Thirties have left a legacy in the minds of right-wing thinkers, in the early twenty-first century, in Britain and America. Today, for all its manifold weaknesses and faults, there is an organization called the United Nations which is in every way more powerful than its feeble ancestor the League. For one thing, it can raise peace-keeping forces. For another, it contains the great powers, especially the United States. Nations can be called to account in its chambers, and its Security Council can summon warring, or potentially warring partners, to discuss peace. Of course, there have been continual wars since its foundation, as those who would see it as a feeble continuation of the League delight to indicate. Thus it is that America and Britain can use the failure of appeasement as a policy against Hitler as an argument for sidetracking the UN, and exercising force – for example in the invasion of Iraq – as a way of eliminating ‘tyranny’. The implication is that, had Britain and France gone to war sooner with Hitler, the devastation and loss of life during 1939–45 might have been reduced or averted. This is a very questionable proposition, as we have seen, since t
he pro-appeaser version of history has at least this strength of argument on its side: how could anyone have been in a position to mass armies on the German border in order to topple its elected government? Previous to the dismemberment of Poland in 1939, Germany and the USSR did not even possess a common border. France and Germany did.

  The pathos, not to say distastefulness, of the appeasing position, either at the time, in the minds of the politicians, or later in the writings of the historians, is that it demands a piece of mental gymnastics which is as foolish as it is pointless: namely believing Hitler, believing one of the most proven liars in diplomatic history. ‘I got the impression that here was a man who could be relied upon when he had given his word,’ said Neville Chamberlain in a private letter on 19 September 1938 after his first meeting with Hitler, not realizing that Hitler proudly saw himself as a warlord who had been on the warpath since 1933.22 No wonder Hitler despised the ‘men of Munich’. ‘I always knew that Neville [Chamberlain] was the lowest (I can’t spell it) flatest[sic]-footed creature that creeps. But will the country follow him in his appeasement policy?’ asked Maynard Keynes in a letter of February 1938, and the answer is that not only would the country follow him, but so would Keynes.23

  Stanley Baldwin’s policy with the European dictators had been to ‘keep them guessing’. Chamberlain’s was to offer the ‘brigand powers’, to use Keynes’s good phrase, ‘better relations’ with France and Britain. 1938 was Hitler’s greatest year. He had already, in 1936, occupied, or reoccupied, the demilitarized Rhineland, territory to which most reasonable people believed Germany to be entitled. In the spring of 1938 he remarked to the Austrian Chancellor, Kurt Schuschnigg: ‘Perhaps I’ll appear some time overnight in Vienna; like a spring storm.’ On 11 March, German troops entered Austria and Grossdeutschland was born, the union of the two great German-speaking nations. Viewed with dread from abroad, the development was welcomed by most Austrians, who idolized Hitler then, just as most of them still do.