Many people in this country still feel very bitterly towards Germany. Our generation can never forget the loss of precious lives and the incalculable suffering and impoverishment which German ambition for world dominion imposed upon us. That is a feeling I fully understand, for my own family losses were terrible and unforgettable. But we must not forever dwell upon the bitterness of bygone days. Our duty now is to build up a better understanding between all European peoples for the future. I know that the people of this country wish strongly and sincerely to live in good relations with their German neighbours across the North Sea. We British have never been good haters.13
Rothermere went to Munich the following year and began to fully embrace the Nazi cause with an article headlined ‘Germany and Inevitability – A Nation Reborn’. It was a heavy story, exploring the theme that the young were taking control of the nation, led by forty-one-year-old Hitler. ‘The older generation of Germany were our enemies. Must we make enemies of this younger generation too?’14
Hitler thanked Lord Rothermere personally for his support and Bunny’s piece was reprinted verbatim in the Nazi party’s own newspaper, the Volkischer Beobachter. It was a sea change from Sunny’s day, when Northcliffe had been enough of an enemy of the German state for them to dispatch a destroyer to shell his house. After Rothermere’s words were published, Mailman Rothay Reynolds was immediately granted personal access to Hitler, who told him he’d read the article ‘with the greatest astonishment . . . Lord Rothermere possesses the true gift of intuitive statesmanship’.15 Bunny later sent Hitler a photograph of himself mounted in a solid gold Cartier frame, as a present. On the reverse was said to be a copy of his article.
Rothermere was roundly attacked in the press for this ‘Nation Reborn’ piece and responded in kind a week later, writing that it had ‘startled and shocked the old women of three countries – France, Germany, and our own’.
It was bound to do so, for it told the truth about the latest phase of the greatest development going on in Europe – the rise to power of the young generation which has grown up since the war. A new idea invariably produces this effect upon the pompous pundits who pontificate in our weekly reviews and those old-fashioned morning newspapers whose sales and influence alike sink steadily month by month towards the vanishing-point. The wiseacres who conduct these out-of-date organs of our Press can see no further than the edge of their own desks. Their minds are set immovably in the mould of pre-war ideas. Because they are stiff-jointed they think the whole world has lost its power of movement. They are incapable of realising that new and powerful forces are at work in Europe, and that the future of this country depends upon our proper understanding of them.16
Princess Stephanie, Bunny’s friend from the casinos who had first roused his curiosity for the Hungarian cause several years before, was, by now, well connected with the Nazis – the princess at one point even had a sexual relationship with Hitler’s handsome personal adjutant – and she was very much playing both sides. In 1933, the year Hitler came to power, British intelligence circulated a note from their French counterparts, who had found documents in her flat in Paris in which the Nazis ordered her to persuade Rothermere to campaign for territory lost to Poland after the Great War, for which they’d pay her £300,000 (something like £19 million today). Rothermere himself was also paying her an annual retainer of £5,000 (around £314,000 today) to liaise with the Nazis.17
Viscount Rothermere filed frequent dispatches from German soil and, as he puttered along in his usual three-car motorcade in the early 1930s, he saw something fluttering upon the roofs of farm-houses in the distance like poppies in an open field: the new flag of the Fatherland. The swastika is an ancient mark that symbolized luck or ‘auspiciousness’ to Buddhists and Hindus. It was a symbol chosen and put in a white circle on a blood-red background by Hitler’s own fair hand, the same hand that would bring war again to the world, staining the once peaceful swastika symbol forever with the blood of innocent women and children. Likewise, Bunny’s support for the Nazis would also leave its own indelible stain on the Mail ’s masthead.
As he sat in the back of his Rolls-Royce, Rothermere must have felt sure he was on the right side of history. He’d finally prove he had his big brother’s editorial gene and he was doing what true reporters did: he was on the road seeing the story for himself. No matter that he was in Germany as a guest of the Nazis, seeing what they wanted him to see. No matter that he was travelling with a convoy of staff and staying in the plushest of hotels, eating in the most expensive restaurants. Harold reached out for words, for weighty phrases that he’d blend with historical details someone else could check for him later, his secretary being jolted around at his side, pen scraping mis-shapes on his pad. The Hitler miracle had yet to fix the roads; it’d be a while before his vast armies were ready to mobilize.
‘On a visit which I am paying to Northern Germany I find the signs of the new Hitler spirit as manifest in the most out-of-the-way villages as in the largest cities,’ Bunny wrote from ‘Somewhere in Naziland’ for the Mail in July 1933. ‘Across the heavy-laden fields of corn one sees the Nazi flag flying from the roofs of lonely farmhouses. Almost every bicycle met on the long, straight roads bears its swastika pennant, and through the picturesque streets of the little country towns stride the sturdy, brown-shirted young men – and their brown-frocked girl helpers – who have taken over the rulership of Germany from their ineffective elders.’18
Bunny hit back at those who claimed the Nazis used foul means over fair in the same article, headlined ‘Youth Triumphant’.
They [Nazi critics] have started a clamorous campaign of denunciation against what they call ‘Nazi atrocities,’ which, as anyone who visits Germany quickly discovers for himself, consist merely of a few isolated acts of violence . . . which have been generalised, multiplied, and exaggerated to give the impression that Nazi rule is a bloodthirsty tyranny.
Germany, he added, had been ‘rapidly falling under the control of its alien elements. In the last days of the pre-Hitler regime there were twenty times as many Jewish Government officials in Germany as had existed before the war. Israelites of international attachments were insinuating themselves into key positions in the German administrative machine.’19
Sir Leicester, arguably the only genuine journalist in the Harmsworth clan after Northcliffe, loathed Harold’s policy towards the Nazis. During a lunch with the Mail ’s editor – Lord Rothermere’s fifth – W. L. Warden in the early 1930s, Sir Leicester said the campaign was alienating Jews and Jewish advertising and also long-term Mail readers who had joined Northcliffe in being suspicious of Germany from the start. ‘Northcliffe had conducted this campaign for years before the war, and the war itself, provoked by Germany as it was, had been the great justification of Northcliffe’s campaign,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Upon this campaign and the wise direction Northcliffe gave the papers throughout these years and during the war I felt, and always had felt, that the strength of the Daily Mail and its reputation was based. To reverse this policy and adopt one of unnecessary friendliness with Germany and Hitler, and Hitlerism worship, would be contrary to the instincts of British nationality, and would inevitably react unfavourably, and perhaps disastrously, upon the circulation of the Daily Mail.’20 George Dawson, the editor of The Times (who had been editor for a while under Northcliffe’s ownership), simply thought Rothermere ‘a joke’.21
Bunny Harmsworth, however, was not alone in being an enthusiast for the Fascist cause – there was a sizeable minority in Britain that shared his support for Hitler,22 and despite Sir Leicester’s concerns his writing actually seemed to have little direct impact on the paper’s circulation. Maybe then, as now, many readers simply skipped the comment pieces altogether and neither read nor cared about Rothermere’s opinions. Germany is, after all, a foreign land and Hitler did not dominate most people’s minds until war was fast approaching.23 Former Prime Minister Lloyd George, for example, also became an admirer and even met the Füh
rer in 1936, referring to Hitler as ‘the greatest German of the age’.24 He thought it a good thing that strong men like Hitler were in power, saying ‘a powerful statesman is in himself a guarantee of peace’. The Führer was doing in Germany what Lloyd George had wanted to do in Britain – he was curing unemployment and making his country strong again. The former PM even gave the Führer the message that ‘public opinion in Great Britain was to an increasing degree showing more and more understanding for Hitler’s position and the one anxiety of British public opinion today was to bring about the closest co-operation between the two countries’.25
At the same time as boosting the Nazi cause, Rothermere did appreciate its dangers – he warned Daily Mail readers that Britain was a ‘fifth rate power’ that needed to re-arm and he worried that German bombers could obliterate Tyneside, ‘that great centre of Socialist pacifism’,26 in a single evening. Strength was the best way to avoid war, and the sky was the key. Britain needed aircraft and Rothermere even paid for the development of his own bomber.
Rothermere was also privately informing the Government of what he had learned about Hitler and his regime, urging politicians to heed the threat of war and to re-arm. In October 1934, he wrote to then Chancellor of the Exchequer Neville Chamberlain to warn him that ‘the oligarchs of Germany are the most dangerous, ruthless men who have ever been in charge of the fortunes of a people of 67,000,000 in number. They will stop at nothing. Violent as they were on 30th June [the purge that saw many of Hitler’s perceived political enemies executed in the ‘night of the long knives’] in internal politics, they will be equally or more violent in external politics.’27 And in May 1935, he wrote to the Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, saying he had ‘built up a fund of some good will’ with Hitler and ‘if in the coming emergency days an informal, semi-official conversation between him and me can serve any national purpose, I place my services at the disposal of the Government’.28 He also claimed he’d resolved to use ‘the language of butter because these dictators live in such an atmosphere of adulation and awe-struck reverence that the language of guns may not go nearly as far.’29 Bunny Harmsworth was a complicated man and, whatever he said in private to British politicians, his words about the Nazis published in the Daily Mail were far more treacle than butter.
England, of course, had her Fascists too. And Bunny also used his Daily Mail as a mouthpiece for their cause, seeing them as a possible antidote to the loss of Britain’s Empire. The British Union of Fascists was founded in 1932 by the British strong man Bunny so craved: a handsome, womanizing, über-ambitious toff called Sir Oswald Mosley.
‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’ wrote Bunny in January 1934. ‘Britain’s survival as a great power will depend on the existence of a well-organised Party of the Right, ready to take over responsibility for national affairs with the same directness of purpose and energy of method as Mussolini and Hitler have displayed . . . That is why I say, Hurrah for the Blackshirts! They are a sign that something is stirring among the youth of Britain.’30 The paper even printed the address so young readers could sign up, and a noticeable increase in the middle-class membership of the British Union of Fascists was noted in places such as Leeds, for instance, whose 2,000-strong membership was partly generated as a result of the Mail ’s call.31
The folly of this anti-Blackshirt campaign – when it is not deliberate falsehood – lies in the fact that it stresses minor and infrequent aspects of a great movement as if they made up the whole. Our Socialist Press, for example, is constantly denouncing what it calls ‘the horrors of the concentration camps’ . . . blood-curdling stories of Nazi brutality which are being circulated at the present time. That isolated outrages may have occurred in Germany is possible. But in comparison with other revolutions far smaller in scope the Germans have set the world a model of moderation.32
After a love affair that lasted a few months, Bunny turned away from the Blackshirts. There were ugly clashes between Blackshirts and Communists at a rally and, as Sir Leicester had warned, it was damaging something Bunny understood far more than politics: advertisers were uneasy. Although Mosley claimed it was specifically Jewish advertisers who stopped Rothermere ‘at the point of an economic gun’, Rothermere dithered. Mosley met Rothermere in a London hotel bedroom to discuss the way ahead, and found Bunny lying on a narrow brass bedstead. ‘I’ll let you know, I’ll let you know,’33 Bunny said, but soon stopped the campaign.
At the end of 1934 Viscount Rothermere positively glowed with admiration when he finally met Hitler for the first time along with his close entourage: Göring, Goebbels and Ribbentrop. Smitten Bunny sat down at his hotel desk in Munich on Christmas Eve and began to write up his impressions for his Daily Mail.
What magic has restored hope to the German hearts, given to German eyes the flash of courage and self-confidence, and magnetised this mighty nation until one feels in its midst as if one were in a gigantic power-house? Hitler. That is the whole answer. Without Hitler none of this would have happened. With Hitler no limits can be set to the developments in Germany that may yet surprise the world. During the past week I have had several opportunities of talking and listening to this unique leader of his fellow-countrymen – not only in the formal atmosphere of the Chancellor’s office but beside a glowing log-fire after luncheon as the short winter afternoon faded into darkness, or in the spacious but simple suite of public rooms at the Chancellery, decorated to his own quiet taste, where he entertained myself and some of his more intimate collaborators to an after-dinner concert of that German music which is his only relaxation. There is something in Hitler’s personality which photographs him instantaneously and indelibly upon the mind. His eyes have remarkable powers of magnetism; his low-pitched voice is eloquent and persuasive . . . It gives me special satisfaction to testify to this from the city [Munich] where the Nazi movement was born, and where, two and a quarter years before Hitler came to power, I was the first outside the ranks of his own followers to make a public prophecy of his ultimate triumph . . . As I have said before I now repeat, that nearly all the news regarding the Nazi regime published even in our most responsible journals is pure moonshine. These have spread, for instance, the impression that German Jews lead an almost hunted existence. Yet in German hotels and restaurants I have frequently seen merry and festive parties of German Jews who showed no symptoms of insecurity or suffering . . . We and the Germans are blood-kindred.34
Article after article signed by Viscount Rothermere in support of the Fascists rained down on his Mail readers for year after year, in addition to the countless bits of news that the paper carried covering the rising tide of world events that would eventually spill over into war. Harold Harmsworth seemed mesmerized by Adolf Hitler; if Bunny had kept a scrapbook, it’d be packed with newspaper cuttings and snaps of him standing alongside the Führer and the Nazi hierarchy. As Hitler rose to absolute power and his henchmen began assembling the machinery that would lead to another world war and the Holocaust, Rothermere’s pen blundered on. And if he knew of the dark events behind the scenes – and, despite Bunny’s knife-wielding ways, the Mail still had the remnants of the fine foreign newsgathering system Sunny had created – he chose to ignore it.
In June 1935, Bunny’s public Hitler-worship reached its peak under the headline ‘Adolf Hitler at Close Range’, accompanied by a complimentary sketch drawing of the most infamous face in history. Bunny described a man who dressed simply and didn’t drink or smoke, a vegetarian who loved dogs. And he apparently adored children, did Adolf Hitler.
After unusual opportunities of observing Herr Hitler at close range, both in private conversation and by a correspondence extending over many months, I would sum up his personality in two words. He is a practical mystic. In him is found the rare combination of dreamer and doer. Like Oliver Cromwell, Joan of Arc, and the Prophet Mahommed, he draws his inspiration from a hidden light not shared by his fellow men. Hitler is in the direct tradition of those great leaders of mankind who appear rarely more often t
han once in two or three centuries. He is the incarnation of the spirit of the German race.35
Rothermere repeatedly urged the British to get into bed with Germany in print. ‘Natural sympathies, due to ties of race and instinct, are fast developing between the British and German nations,’ he wrote in July 1936, ‘. . . the close association in international affairs of two such mighty States as Great Britain and Germany would create a force that no aggressor would dare to challenge.’36 A year later, alongside a picture of himself standing proudly at Hitler’s side, Rothermere wrote that ‘I am what the textbooks of philosophy call a “pragmatist”. Such people do not ask themselves “What is the ideal solution of this difficulty” but “What is the best practical solution?” . . . Let us rid ourselves of the delusion that Hitler is some sort of ogre in human shape. I have been his guest at Berchtesgaden, and had long conversations with him there. He has assured me of his desire to meet the British Government halfway.’37
In March 1938, Hitler reached down to his map and rubbed out the border with Austria, pulling the nation of his birth into the Third Reich. And inside Germany, the ever-increasing persecution of her Jews since Hitler first came to power exploded on Kristallnacht – ‘night of the broken glass’ – when the Nazis unleashed an orgy of violence in which Jewish synagogues and businesses were destroyed. Around 30,000 Jews were disappeared into concentration camps. As 1938 continued, the Mail ’s sub-editors seemed not to want to dirty their own hands with any more of Rothermere’s words. Stories bylined ‘Viscount Rothermere’ began to just be tagged ‘Some More Postscripts’ or ‘Further Postscripts’, with no effort applied to write a catchy headline. But, as tensions escalated, the adoration didn’t stop, as one article from May 1938 attests:
Herr Hitler is proud to call himself a man of the people, but, notwithstanding, the impression that has remained with me after every meeting with him is that of a great gentleman. He places a guest at his ease immediately. When you have been with him for five minutes you feel that you have known him for a long time. His courtesy is beyond words, and men and women alike are captivated by his ready and disarming smile. He is a man of rare culture. His knowledge of music, painting, and architecture is profound.38
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