Page 64 - Was Hitler a Riddle?

The British Diplomats 51

london’s response
to the diplomatic reports

Phipps’s recommendations were sensible, but by 1937 the political lead-
ership in Great Britain had taken a turn that made their implementation
impossible. in point of fact, the odds that london would take action in
response to the warnings of its diplomats in Germany had always been re-
mote. london’s inaction did not stem from the failure of senior officials to
be moved by the accounts of Nazi brutalities and the warnings that Hitler
and many of his supporters were fanatics unlikely to be restrained in their
quest to establish Germany as the preeminent power in europe. rather, the
government’s tepid response to Hitler’s conduct of affairs must be attrib-
uted to a policy of reconciliation pursued together with France after 1924,
but more fundamentally to the disarray that characterized British politics
after the onset of the Great depression in 1929. among the most important
factors responsible for the disarray were the ideological predispositions of
the country’s elite, the political ineptness of many government leaders, and,
perhaps most important, the widespread hostility among the population at
large to any policy that might lead to military conflict.
When Germany turned to Nazism, ramsay Macdonald was the prime
minister. He had been a leading pacifist in 1914, and when the labour Party,
which he had helped to found in the late nineteenth century, supported the
war effort, he stepped down as chairman of the party’s representatives in
Parliament. He certainly deplored Nazism and at times thought that war
with Germany could not be avoided. in fact, he became “exasperated” with
those who endlessly called for disarmament—he called them “the pure sen-
timentalists”—and yet he could not fully shed his own long-held pacifist
convictions. as his biographer noted, “even when he had become convinced
intellectually that force might have to be answered by force, his emotions
rebelled against the idea.” in truth, it is not clear whether Macdonald’s
93
views on world affairs mattered at all because he did not exercise much in-
fluence in the national government that was formed under his leadership in
1931 to combat the depression. He still considered himself a labourite even
though he had defied the party’s wishes in forming a unity government
with the Conservatives, who held 470 seats in Parliament as against only 13
by the prime minister’s newly created National labour Party. even if he had
been inclined to play a significant role in the government, he was politically
too weak to do so.