Page 78 - Was Hitler a Riddle?

The British Diplomats 65

in their minds. Chamberlain had vivid recollections of the horrors of World
War i, especially the loss of his favorite nephew, and to avoid another round
of bloodletting he was willing to go far to meet Hitler’s demands. there is
no evidence that the prime minister was in any way sympathetic to Nazism
or to its brutal treatment of opponents, real or assumed.
the second group of appeasers was made up of pacifists, those who op-
posed war under any circumstances. this group received its strongest and
broadest support from young people, and especially from students at elite
universities. the pacifists also did not admire the ideology of National so-
cialism or the Nazi form of government.
the third group might be called, for lack of a better term, ideological
appeasers, for its adherents admired some or all of the major aspects of
National socialism and regarded the Nazis as the most ardent opponents of
Bolshevism, in fact as the only political force that could defeat that scourge
and thus protect the West from a great evil. the British Union of Fascists,
a party that favored appeasement without reservation, advocated the estab-
lishment in Britain of a new social and political order following the Nazi
model.
One common thread in the thinking of all three groups was the convic-
tion that Germany had been treated unfairly at the end of World War i and
that Nazi demands that the treaty of Versailles be altered were not unrea-
sonable. this study focuses on the first group of appeasers because they
were the ones most directly responsible for government policy during the
period that Chamberlain was prime minister. 117
remarkably, the change in Britain’s foreign policy under Chamberlain
was not based on a reassessment by foreign diplomats in Germany of Hit-
ler’s character or his conduct of affairs. On the contrary, the portrait of
the Führer and his senior subordinates fashioned by most of the diplomats
continued to be highly unflattering, its central features not much different
from the assessments formulated by rumbold and Phipps. For example,
in mid-October 1938, F. M. shepherd, the consul in Bremen, reported that
“the opinion that the Führer is not quite normal, which for some time past
has been held by local medical circles, is now shared by quite a number of
the general public.” 118
even the new ambassador to Berlin, Nevile Henderson, who assumed
office in May 1937 and soon emerged as a leading proponent of appease-
ment in government circles, found much to criticize in Hitler’s demeanor
and political stance. if statesmen and officials in london chose to depict
Hitler as a riddle, it was not because they lacked evidence to the contrary