COLUMN LEFT/ ALEXANDER COCKBURN : Brave Little Britain? Not Entirely : New investigations show the extent to which some would go for peace with Hitler.

In Britain, even now, the rhetoric of 1940 is never far away. Former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, campaigning against the specter of full economic and political European union, draws on the emotional capital of those months in 1940 and 1941 when, on the edge of a Continent swift to collaborate with the Nazi invader, Britain stood alone.

The truth is less romantic, though rarely stated. Before the war the British ruling class was mostly eager to cooperate with Hitler, who was sending Wehrmacht and SS divisions east against the Soviets. During the early part of the war, a substantial faction remained eager to sue for peace. There is evidence to suggest that had the Germans managed to cross the English Channel (the failure to do this was less a result of the supposedly vital Battle of Britain than of Hitler’s view that Britain was never really the true enemy) most Britons would have collaborated with the Germans as placidly as did their Continental neighbors.

This summer has seen a couple of shafts of historical sunlight pierce the discreet darkness in which these unpalatable truths are normally swathed.

In June, the KGB disclosed a very interesting file on the Rudolf Hess case. On May 11, 1941, on the eve of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Hess, Hitler’s deputy, flew to Scotland, landing at the estate of the Duke of Hamilton. He planned to contact the British peace faction and inaugurate talks, leaving Germany free to attack the Soviet Union disencumbered of any threat from the west. Fear of such a treaty was what pushed Stalin toward his own pact with the Fuehrer.

Hess was arrested and put in prison, where he stayed until his suicide in 1987.

The documents, as reported in the New York Times, disclose the predictably passionate interest that Stalin and his colleagues took in the Hess flight. Lavrenti Beria, head of the NKVD (forerunner of the KGB) communicated to Stalin the reports of agents in London, including Kim Philby. According to Philby, Hess and Hamilton had been set up--lured by letters purportedly from the Duke of Hamilton but in fact written by Churchill’s agents.

British archives are far more firmly closed on this episode than those of the KGB and will remain so until 2017. The reason is almost certainly that the archives would reveal Churchill’s fears that the pro-German peace faction, whose most conspicuous representative was the Duke of Windsor, would overwhelm his government and negotiate surrender terms. Some Churchill supporters even feared a coup.

By the time of the Hess flight, the Germans had actually occupied British territory, the Channel Islands. Most of the inhabitants collaborated. The local governments thoughtfully printed a guidebook for their new rulers, and passed anti-Semitic laws without delay. Lists of Jews were also provided and the betrayed were sent to their deaths. A camp for prisoners of the Germans was set up in Alderney in which 7,000 captives were starved, tortured and thrown over the cliffs.

A recent British law requiring investigation of war crimes committed by Britons is already leading to fresh disclosures. Newly unearthed documents, quoted in The Observer last Sunday, show Victor Carey, head of Guernsey’s civil administration, zealously promulgating the Nuremberg laws and other anti-Jewish edicts. In one 1940 letter to the Nazi field commander, Carey wrote, “Regarding the registration of Jews . . . I can assure you there will be no delay as far as I am concerned.” After the war there were no prosecutions in the Channel Islands for collaborating with the enemy. Indeed, Carey was made bailiff of Guernsey and knighted.

One historian of these ugly events, Clive Ponting, concludes in his “1940: Myth and Reality,” that “the example of the Channel Islands shows what might have happened if the Germans had mounted a successful invasion of Britain.”

My own father, himself on the Nazi death list, asked the man who ran his local pub, who visited the Channel Islands after the war, why the inhabitants had behaved in this disgusting fashion. “But Claud,” the friend answered matter-of-factly, “they thought the Nazis were going to win.”

So too did a lot of other people in 1940 and 1941, all the way through to the moment Roosevelt deliberately ignored warnings and let the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor. Most Britons would have gone along with the winner, content not to stand alone. That’s where Thatcher is making her big mistake. Long-term, Germany did win and most Britons accept this matter-of-factly, acquiescing, in a united Europe, to the domination of the Reich, whose welfare provisions and social safety nets far outstrip those available on the more primitive side of the Channel.