Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (43 page)

Nevertheless, it is important to note that Hitler expected him to. On 22 August, he told his commanders at the Obersalzberg: ‘England does not want the conflict to break out for two or three years.’
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And Ribbentrop’s master-stroke - the Nazi-Soviet Pact, signed the next day in Moscow - seemed only to strengthen his hand. How could Britain possibly threaten intervention over Poland when Hitler had Stalin on his side? Although Hitler does seem to have wavered momentarily, postponing his invasion of Poland scheduled for 26 August, within four days he had swung back to bellicosity (‘The English believe Germany is weak. They will see they are deceiving themselves’); and the next day he overruled Goering and Goebbels, despite their ‘scepticism’ about English non-intervention: ‘The Führer does not believe England will intervene’.
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Hitler was wrong, of course, but the fact that he could think in this way on the very eve of the war shows how unrealistic it is to imagine a harder-line British policy somehow averting war and perhaps even toppling him. In fact, a far more plausible counterfactual is of British policy going even further than appeasement to conciliate Germany and avoid war, oblivious to the fact that Nazism had an internal dynamic to its foreign policy, requiring sustained expansion.

The possibility of a formal understanding, if not an alliance, with Germany was seriously discussed on numerous occasions during the 1930s. Hitler frequently expressed his desire for such a deal with Britain, beginning even before
Mein Kampf
.
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From November 1933, he sought some kind of naval agreement with Britain, and secured one in June 1935. ‘An Anglo-German combination’, he noted at the time, ‘would be stronger than all the other powers.’
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Such ideas resurfaced four years later when Hitler started to feel nervous about British intervention on the eve of his invasion of Poland. He had ‘always wanted German-British understanding’, he assured Henderson on 25 August 1939.
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There was no shortage of people in 1930s Britain who would have viewed a British accommodation with Hitler positively, if not with enthusiasm. This feeling extended far beyond the lunatic fringe of anti-Semites like William Joyce (‘Lord Haw-Haw’), Henry Hamilton Beamish and Arnold Leese, some of whom would actually end up on the German side during the war. Notoriously, there was also the British Union of Fascists of Sir Oswald Mosley, the one-time Labour party darling, who had followed Mussolini down the fascist road. But there were other, far less radical Germanophiles. There were imperialists who saw Germany threatening no part of the empire, conservatives and Catholics who saw Germany as a bulwark against atheistic Russian Bolshevism, press barons who admired the rhetoric of the dictators, and businessmen who thought appeasement good for trade.
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Perhaps most interestingly, a significant proportion of the British aristocracy had strong pro-German and sometimes even pro-Nazi leanings. In his early months as ambassador in London, for example, Ribbentrop won over Anglo-German aristocrats like the Earl of Athlone, Germanophiles like Lord Lothian and socialites like Lady Cunard. Lothian, not untypically, described Nazi anti-Semitism as ‘largely the reflex of the external persecution to which Germans have been subjected since the war’. Similarly, when Lord Derby heard that Goering planned to visit Britain he invited him to stay at Knowsley Hall to watch the Grand National. The Marquess of Londonderry and Lords Allen of Hurtwood and Stamp were all impressed favourably by Hitler when they met him.
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One very well-born Englishman in particular could have made a very substantial contribution to Anglo-German rapprochement had he not given up his position of influence for the sake of love - or for the sake of the then Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin’s rather Victorian notion of public attitudes towards divorce. King Edward VIII not only loved Mrs Simpson, he also admired Hitler. While still Prince of Wales, he was authoritatively described as being ‘quite pro-Hitler’ and was reported to have declared that: ‘It was no business of ours to interfere in Germany’s internal affairs either on Jews or anything else. ... Dictators were very popular these days and we might want one in England before long.’ In 1935 his father, George V, had to rebuke him for a notably pro-German speech. A year later, Edward succeeded to the throne and almost immediately tried to persuade the then Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, not to oppose the German remilitarisation of the Rhineland. In response to an appeal from the German ambassador, he ‘sent for the PM’ - Baldwin - and, according to one version, ‘gave him a piece of my mind. I told the old so-and-so that I would abdicate if he made war. Then there was a frightful scene. But you needn’t worry. There won’t be a war.’ When Ribbentrop took over as ambassador, the German embassy also took pains to cultivate Mrs Simpson.
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What if Stanley Baldwin had not prevailed upon Edward to abdicate? There were alternatives: a morganatic marriage, as proposed by the newspaper magnate Beaverbrook, for example, which would have allowed Mrs Simpson to marry Edward without acquiring the formal status of royalty. Or he could have opted for the throne and sacrificed love. The question may seem irrelevant to the history of the Second World War; but it is a crucial one because of the key role played by the King in May 1940, following Chamberlain’s humiliation in the House of Commons in the wake of the Norwegian fiasco. George VI, Edward’s brother and reluctant substitute on the throne, was a committed appeaser who did not want Chamberlain to resign, and favoured Halifax over Churchill as his successor. But he did little more than accept grudgingly Halifax’s decision to step aside. Would Edward VIII have acted differently? Just possibly, he might have been more committed to Churchill, who had leapt somewhat quixotically to his defence during the Abdication Crisis. But when confronted with the possibility of war with Germany, his pro-German leanings might well have counted for more.

For the possibility of peace with Germany did not end with the declaration of war over Poland in September 1939. Hitler was dismayed by the British declaration of war, telling Alfred Rosenberg that he ‘couldn’t grasp’ what Chamberlain was ‘really after’. ‘Even if England secured a victory,’ he pointed out, ’the real victors would be the United States, Japan and Russia.’
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On 6 October, he therefore renewed his offer of peace, though once again it was spurned by Chamberlain. But as late as 1940 Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry continued to press this idea: ‘Sooner or later the racially valuable Germanic element in Britain would have to be brought in to join Germany in the future secular struggles of the white race against the yellow race, or the Germanic race against Bolshevism.‘
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Hitler wanted, as he said in May 1940, to sound out England on dividing the world.’ A month later, he spoke of the possibility of a ‘reasonable peace agreement’ with Britain. Time and again, Hitler expressed regret that he was fighting Britain, because (in Ribbentrop’s words) he doubted ‘the desirability of demolishing the British Empire’.
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As he told Halder in July, six days before his final peace offer, he ‘did not like’ war with Britain: ‘The reason is that if we crush England’s military power, the British Empire will collapse. That is of no use to Germany ... [but] would benefit only Japan, America and others.’
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In recent years, revisionist historians such as John Charmley have argued that this analysis was all too prescient. Britain’s victory in 1945 was, they argue, a Pyrrhic one. So another possibility needs to be addressed. What if the war had gone ahead in 1939, but Britain had subsequently sought peace with Germany? The idea is that Germany would then have spent itself fighting against Soviet Russia, leaving the British Empire intact, the Conservatives in power and the British economy unimpaired. According to Charmley, opening negotiations through Mussolini in the summer of 1940, after the defeat of France, would have made sense to many people, not least Halifax and Butler.
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In his view, we should not accept without question Churchill’s argument that any terms from Hitler would necessarily have been ‘Carthaginian’. Before becoming Prime Minister, even Churchill himself had urged Chamberlain ‘not [to] close the door upon any genuine peace offer’ from Germany. And when the War Cabinet met to discuss the question of seeking a negotiated peace on 26 May, he could not deny the attractions of such a course, with Britain’s strategic and economic positions both so parlous. Of particular concern to Churchill was the lack of tangible support from the United States, which he already saw as the key to victory over Germany. He even went so far as to remark: ‘If we could get out of this jam by giving up Malta and Gibraltar and some African colonies I would jump at it.’ Of course, he added that it was ‘incredible that Hitler would consent to any terms that we would accept’ - a point he reiterated two days later: ‘The Germans would demand our Fleet ... our naval bases, and much else. We should become a slave state.’
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But the drift of Charmley’s argument is that this was self-serving; Churchill knew that his position as Prime Minister depended on maintaining the ‘victory at all costs’ ‘conquer or die’ line. Alan Clark has also rejected this distinction as ‘a lethal concept’.
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According to Clark, a deal could have been made with Germany as late as the spring of 1941, with the Battle of Britain won and Italy defeated in Africa. Hitler wanted to secure his flank before he turned on Russia. Hess flew to Britain in an attempt to broker a deal; but his mission was hushed up by Churchill.

It is not inconceivable that a government led by someone other than Churchill might have made a separate peace with Germany, leaving Hitler free to fight Stalin. A German war directed solely against the Soviet Union would have attracted at least some support on the British right. After all, many Conservatives had all along regarded Communism as a bigger threat than fascism. Support for the Finns’ struggle against Stalin was widespread in 1940. It is not impossible to imagine a Legion of St George (perhaps commanded by John Amery) fighting against Communism and serving under German command rather as the Spanish and French fascists did on the Eastern Front. Even within the government, despite the new-found Russophilia of Churchill and some of his close supporters, there were those who favoured a strategy of pitting Hitler against Stalin. As late as 1942, a Tory minister, John Moore-Brabazon, had to resign for saying openly what a number of people thought privately - that a struggle between Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia ‘suited us’. It was the same stance as Henry Kissinger took during the Iran-Iraq War: ‘A pity they both can’t lose’ - the revisionist argument in a nutshell.

But what would have been the result when, as would inevitably have happened sooner or later, one side or the other finally won? If it had not been for the distraction of the war in the Mediterranean, where Mussolini’s botched invasion of Greece allowed British forces to attack the Italians in Libya, the victor might well have been Germany. The German intervention in the Mediterranean, which necessitated not only sending troops to Libya but also taking over Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Greece and Crete, delayed the launch of Operation Barbarossa against Stalin by a crucial month. Had Hitler secured some kind of agreement with Britain, however, he could have avoided the Mediterranean distraction and attacked the Soviet Union on schedule. He could also have deployed his entire army, navy and air force solely against Russia. With no hope of a Second Front in the West, no convoys and no allies whatever, Russia’s much purged Red Army - which could not even smash puny Finland - might well have been defeated and driven back behind the Urals. As it was, the Wehrmacht took most of Stalingrad, besieged Leningrad and reached Moscow’s outlying metro stations. A victory in European Russia would certainly have been more likely if, as the revisionists suggest, Britain had sought an accommodation with Germany in 1940 of 1941. And, as Michael Burleigh argues in the next chapter, it would have left Britain in a position of parlous weakness.

A central assumption of the Charmley-Clark thesis is that Hitler’s peace offers to Britain were sincere - or at the very least that they could be publicly treated as such. However, in assessing Hitler’s supposed Anglophilia, we have to distinguish between casual reflections based on Hitler’s theory that there was a racial affinity between the Anglo-Saxons and the Germans, and the
Realpolitik
of Hitlerian strategy, which from 1936, if not earlier, always implied the subordination of Britain to German power. Encouraged by a disillusioned Ribbentrop to regard Britain as a decadent and declining power, Hitler had in fact come to the conclusion by late 1936 that ‘even an honest German-English rapprochement could offer Germany no concrete, positive advantages’, and that Germany therefore had ‘no interest in coming to an understanding with England’.
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As he put it at a meeting with his military chiefs in November 1937 (recorded in the infamous ‘Hossbach Memorandum’), Britain (along with France) was a ‘hate-inspired antagonist’ whose empire ‘could not in the long run be maintained by power politics’.
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It was a view constantly reinforced by Ribbentrop, who saw England as ‘our most dangerous opponent’
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In planning his invasions of Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland, Hitler swung between confidence that Britain was too weak to intervene and a conviction that Germany would withstand such an intervention. Talking to the army commanders in May 1939, he expressed his ‘doubt whether a peaceful settlement with England is possible. It is necessary to prepare for a showdown. England sees in our development the establishment of a hegemony which would weaken England. Therefore England is our enemy and the showdown with England is a matter of life and death.’
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Nothing is more indicative of Hitler’s true attitude towards England than his ‘Z plan’ naval directive of 27 January 1939, for a fleet which by 1944-6 would be capable of challenging any power on the high seas - that is, Britain or the United States. John Keegan has posed a further naval counterfactual: ‘Had Germany deployed at the outset of the war the force of 300 U-boats which Dönitz had advised Hitler was necessary to win the Battle of the Atlantic, Britain would surely have collapsed as a combatant long before events in the Pacific War brought about the United States’ entry.’
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With only half its food consumption met from domestic resources, and all its oil, rubber and non-ferrous metals imported, Britain could have been brought to its knees by a submarine blockade.