Appeasement’s naive advocate

In his prize-winning novel, “The Remains of the Day,” Kazuo Ishiguro imagined how sympathy for Hitler among the British upper classes must have appeared to a loyal but inwardly affronted butler in a noble household of the 1930s. When the Merchant-Ivory team made Ishiguro’s story into a film, they cast the actor James Fox as the pro-Nazi appeaser, Lord Darlington. Deliberate or not, it was a skillful choice: Though Fox had more hair, his long, hawklike features set into what seemed like a permanent wince uncannily resembled those of the real-life Lord Londonderry, a Conservative grandee and cabinet minister who disgraced himself in pursuit of accommodation with the Nazis.

You might think a conceited and obstinate British peer who backed the wrong horse too narrow a subject for a book-length study. But Ian Kershaw, a historian and biographer of Hitler, turns Londonderry’s limitations to advantage. In the hands of the right author, failures can be as interesting as successes. Out of Londonderry’s downfall, Kershaw creates an intriguing and remarkably topical essay on the failure by Britain’s politicians to find durable ways to meet the Nazi threat. Containment or regime change? Diplomacy or war? The issues were as vexing then as now. Londonderry’s flaws -- an undentable pride mixed with scarcely believable ineptitude -- were his alone. But his attitudes and miscalculations were not in the least unique. In many ways, he was entirely representative.

Charles Vane-Tempest-Stewart, the seventh marquis of Londonderry, was born to vast wealth and unquestioned privilege in 1878. War service and wounds at the Battle of the Somme interrupted an otherwise untroubled ascent through Eton and Sandhurst (Britain’s West Point) to a seat in Parliament and a high place in government. Like others of his class, he was pro-empire, anti-trade union and ill at ease with mass democracy.

In 1931, Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald made him minister for air in a coalition government. The lavish political parties that Londonderry and his wife gave at their London mansion on Park Lane led one wit to remark that he had “catered his way to the cabinet.” In fact he knew a lot about aviation and was a good choice. Ambitious for more, he believed himself born for the top. As Britain’s foreign secretary from 1812 to 1822, a distinguished and equally reactionary ancestor, Robert Castlereagh, had presided with Count Metternich over the post-Napoleonic reordering of Europe. It now looked to Londonderry as if Europe again needed a similarly comprehensive settlement that would pacify Germany. Convinced that he had the talent and vision to help bring it off, he fully expected, before long, as foreign secretary, to be another Castlereagh.

On every count he was wrong. Londonderry was no simpleton, but he was poor at politics. His aim was reasonable enough: to stiffen diplomacy with rearmament. As air minister, he battled in vain against a reluctant Treasury to expand Britain’s air force.

Mischievously his cousin, the anti-appeasement Winston Churchill, made it look as if Londonderry, not the Treasury, was to blame. Worse still, Londonderry made an astonishingly crass public speech calling for more bombers on the argument that they were a cheap means of imperial control, especially against tribesmen on India’s Afghan border and in the defense of British interests in newly independent Iraq. The outcry from the left and center was deafening. When Stanley Baldwin replaced MacDonald as prime minister in 1935, he kicked Londonderry upstairs into a non-job. After an election later that year, Baldwin dropped him from the cabinet altogether.

Londonderry never got over it. Baldwin sacked him because he was a liability and a lightweight, not for his foreign-policy views. But Londonderry was too arrogant and self-centered to understand. Out of pique he embarked on a campaign of self-vindication that lasted until his death in 1949. Betrayed as he saw it by Tory colleagues, he would prove who was right about Hitler. Like many sufferers from self-certainty, Londonderry saw the choices as blindingly simple: Either rearm to resist Nazi Germany or smother it in an embrace of friendship. As Britain was not willing to do the first, it had no option but to try the second.

So began Lord and Lady Londonderry’s extraordinary courtship of the Nazi leaders. They socialized at Joachim von Ribbentrop’s parties. After shooting with Hermann Goering on his estate, Carinhall, Lady Londonderry sent a cringe-making thank-you letter that ended in a gushing reference to Richard Wagner’s hero, “Can I call you Siegfried?” In Berlin, Londonderry met Hitler and was taken in by his seeming readiness to please.

Although the Londonderrys’ behavior was gullible and shocking, few thought it reprehensible at the time because they wanted what the Londonderrys wanted: a settlement and peace. The Londonderrys were not alone in chumming up to top Nazis: To the irritation of the Foreign Office, many of Britain’s great and good beat a path to Berlin. Such criticism as there was focused less on contact with Nazis than on how effective freelance efforts of this kind could really be.

Though few were as shamelessly visible as the Londonderrys, many thought like them. To most British Conservatives, Hitler was not the demon he became. They welcomed his crushing of the left, the stabilization of the economy and the end of street fighting, although Nazi anti-Semitism and recurrent violence undoubtedly disturbed them. Above all, they saw him as a bulwark against communism.

Admiration for Benito Mussolini, Italy’s fascist dictator, was widespread. From 1933 until 1938, when a combination of German expansion and Nazi pogroms finally opened their eyes, the Daily Mail and other conservative papers published fawning accounts of Hitler’s New Order. Even among those who saw Hitler for what he was, any thought of an anti-Nazi coalition was faced with distrust toward France and Russia. On the left, pacifism was widespread and the idea of another war was abhorrent. Many socialists saw Hitler as a tool of big business, just as conservatives wishfully thought Germany’s old upper classes would soon take him in hand. Ignorance of this kind played a large part on both sides of the spectrum. If Hitler confused Germans, Kershaw wisely notes, it was hardly surprising that he baffled foreigners.

After his sacking, Londonderry never returned to office. As Hitler’s demands grew, opinion in Britain stiffened. A majority continued to hope for peace. But more and more people reconciled themselves to war. Even after war came in September 1939, avenues were sought for a negotiated peace. Only after Hitler’s armies turned west in spring 1940 did Britain, under Churchill, accept that it was in a war to the finish. Earlier Londonderry and those like him had looked quixotic at worst. Now they were outcasts, if not traitors.

Aggrieved and bitter, Londonderry slipped into decline. He continued his futile campaign to prove himself right, exasperating even friends with a stream of complaining letters and ill-judged speeches. On his death, after a series of strokes, the malign-tongued member of Parliament and diarist Chips Channon noted kindly for once that Londonderry had been right all along: Britain’s only choice in the 1930s was either to make friends with Hitler or rearm. That was a flattering simplification, as Kershaw convincingly argues. Misled by his own prejudices, Londonderry never grasped the political character of the people he was trying to befriend. Had he done so, he might have seen that there were no bounds to the ambitions of a radicalized Germany. He might have understood that Nazism had bitten deep and would be extirpated only by a devastating and total war.

But then, even as late as 1939, almost nobody saw this last point either. The wars people start are seldom those they finish. Three weeks after the declaration of hostilities, Sir Alexander Cadogan, the head of the Foreign Office, asking himself what Britain’s war aims should be, noted in his diary, “Must try and think this out.” *