The defeat of ‘the appeasers’ entailed deceiving and frightening the public to destroy their faith in peace and normality. The alarm created over German rearmament and territorial revision, and the sense of a need to confront and humble ‘the dictators’, was often knowingly based on false sources, and the alarmists were seldom honest about their real motives. Winston Churchill routinely asserted inversions of reality. He predicted privately to his wife in December 1938 that “when Hitler moved again, probably in February or March, it would be against Poland”, to the east, yet he wanted ordinary Britons to fear a German attack westward. In neither direction was such a move planned. To the public, Churchill defended the Soviets in terms he thought would also condemn Germany:

“Soviet Russia… has never made the blunder of thinking the welfare of its people could be increased by looting its neighbours. However much one may disagree with its political and economic theories, it has hitherto shown no trace of the aggressive intentions which appear to inform the three partners of the so-called axis.”1

When, in October 1939, the Soviets did show such intentions and occupied eastern Poland, Churchill dropped this argument without explanation; when they conquered Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia in the summer of 1940, he made minimal and perfunctory protests.2

Tactical magnification

Since 1933, the demand for anti-German policies had been justified mainly by two methods. The first had been to purport Hitler’s eagerness to suddenly attack Britain from the air. Later a range of other countries were said to be threatened too. The second, seeded by Samuel Untermyer and Churchill, was to magnify the crimes of Hitler’s regime toward civilians. The mass of assaults on Jews and their property on the 9th and 10th of November 1938 (‘the night of broken glass’) provided an opportunity for the latter. According to a typical formulation,

“The event… was widely reported in the international press, which reacted with revulsion to what it had witnessed. It marked the moment at which Nazism could no longer be regarded as anything but a malign political force, the moment at which it lost any residual semblance of respectability as a grassroots political movement. The civilised world was outraged.”3

Much of the same press, and Churchill, were at that moment advocating an alliance between Britain and the Soviet Union; the Soviet regime, at the direct orders of its leadership, executed around a thousand people per day at the time. “The civilised world” could only justify turning a blind eye to a few of those, not all. It was true that, as the Times said, “No foreign propagandist bent upon blackening Germany before the world could outdo the tale of burnings and beatings, of blackguardly assaults on defenceless and innocent people, which disgraced that country yesterday.”4 That the Soviets’ vastly greater crimes could not “outdo” those of Hitler’s regime, though, owed to the shared assumptions of the Times and the rest of the “international press”, for whom, beneath all the rhetoric, Jewish interests were sacred.

Accusations of exterminatory intent on the part of Germany had been the stock in trade of the international Jewish alliance since the launch of their international boycott in May 1933. What Untermyer, the boycott’s main instigator, had baselessly predicted in 1933, Victor Rothschild, the third Baron Rothschild, asserted was underway in December 1938 at a meeting at Mansion House: “The slow murder of 600,000 people”, referring to German Jewry.5 The attacks of the previous month, an extraordinary event in Germany, had killed 91 Jews, implying that the odds of natural expiry for the rest of the 600,000 were much better than Lord Rothschild suggested. Such a rate of killing would have been enviable to any of Stalin’s ‘kulaks’ or ‘saboteurs’. That Rothschild’s meeting was at the same venue as those of the Russo-Jewish Committee in 1881 was fitting; for the purposes of “Jewish foreign policy”, Hitler was the new Tsar.6,7

Lord Rothschild at Mansion House in December 1938

Regardless of whose crimes were more heinous, Franklin Roosevelt had long since chosen his favourite Eurasian power, and like Churchill, he began to side with the Soviets overtly in November 1938. Roosevelt had in September told the British government, in strict secrecy and at conscious risk of impeachment, that he had planned the best means by which Britain could begin a war against Germany under “defensive” and “humanitarian” pretences that the USA could join without violating the Neutrality Act.8 According to Manfred Jonas, he congratulated Neville Chamberlain on avoiding war with the Munich Agreement in September, but after “[Hitler’s] announcement on 9 October that Germany’s western fortifications would be strengthened” and “anti-Jewish violence in Germany on 8–9 November”, he “became convinced that the Führer could not be appeased but needed to be stopped.” Roosevelt

“sought yet another $500,000,000 for defence spending in December 1938 and spoke of the need for an American air force of 10,000 aircraft with the capability to build 20,000 more each year. ‘For the first time since the Holy Alliance of 1818’, he told a meeting of his defence chiefs, the United States ‘faced the possibility of an attack on the Atlantic side of both the Northern and Southern hemispheres.”9

The defence funding Roosevelt sought was subject to oversight by the Senate Military Affairs Committee, which included several pro-neutrality senators. In late January 1939 Roosevelt invited all the members of the committee to the White House and, according to Donald Watt, “told them that in 1936 the US Government had learnt that Germany, Italy and Japan had reached agreement ‘to move simultaneously or to take turns’ in aggressive actions against other nations [and] they had ‘today — without any question whatever — what amounts to a defensive and offensive alliance’[.]” He then asserted that “The first line of America’s defence in the Pacific was the American Pacific islands” and that on the Atlantic side, America’s ‘first line of defence’ was all the countries of Europe except Germany and Italy, including “Russia” (which presumably covered Ukraine and other ‘Soviet republics’). Roosevelt thus sought to commit the USA to a foreign policy even more favourable to the Soviet cause than that of the Comintern and the Popular Front. Of his list of countries, several were under Soviet control within two years. Roosevelt made a show of indignance against their invasion of Finland and left it at that; as with Churchill, then and 25 years earlier, invocations of freedom, democracy or the rights of small nations were mere cant, and beside the extremity of the diplomatic commitments it entailed, Roosevelt’s policy was a response to an illusion, for as Watt says, “[t]here was no tripartite agreement [and] no concerted action between Berlin, Rome and Tokyo”.10

Unintelligence

Roosevelt appears to have selected intelligence sources according to their conformity with his pre-existing preferences. According to Watt, alongside other dubious sources, The Week was “a journal which seems to have served Roosevelt and the American Senate alike as a substitute for the intelligence service they had yet to create”.11 The Week was produced by the Comintern propagandist Claud Cockburn, who received leaked information from Soviet collaborators like Churchill and Robert Vansittart and had many of the same sources as them, including NKVD agents Guy Burgess and Otto Katz (alias Andre Simon).12 Typically information was leaked to him by Vladimir Poliakoff, a Jewish immigrant from Russia and diplomatic correspondent for The Times.13

Both Vansittart and Reginald Leeper, comrades in the anti-German faction at the Foreign Office, developed close relationships with diplomatic correspondents of the major newspapers like Poliakoff. Where those papers’ editors were less eager about anti-fascism, correspondents were encouraged to bypass or negate the editorial line and were provided leaked information to use. Geoffrey Dawson, the editor of The Times, was friendly to Chamberlain and relatively averse to war with Germany. He was, as such, a natural target for Cockburn, who from 1937 published stories about ‘The Cliveden Set’, referring to a fictional version of a real social group centred on the Tory MP Nancy Astor and her husband Waldorf, who was the second Viscount Astor and owner of the Observer newspaper, and including Dawson, Lord Lothian (Philip Kerr), Lord Halifax (Edward Wood) and other upper-class political and media figures. British foreign policy was, in Cockburn’s portrayal, shaped to the demands of this group, whose loyalty was to ‘the Nazis’. Cockburn smugly described how the leftist press turned his invention into an apparent reality.14 The Astors and their friends were vilified and harassed.15

Roosevelt chose to treat The Week as one of his most trusted intelligence sources and the Cliveden Set as real and influential.16 As Cockburn was known to be a liar and a fabricator of stories, Roosevelt probably selected his reporting for its usefulness in providing pretexts for anti-fascist policies, no matter how extreme or contrary to voters’ wishes they were.17 ‘Isolationists’ and ‘America firsters’ soon came to play a comparable role as the Cliveden Set in American politics: a threat whose activities made necessary ever more anti-German, pro-Soviet foreign policy and ever more authoritarian domestic measures. Most historians are less frank than Benjamin Ginsberg, who states that “[d]uring the late 1930s, Jews and the Roosevelt administration… became close allies” and had “a common set of enemies—right-wing, pro-German, and isolationist organizations”. He continues:

“In the years before World War II, the efforts of the Jewish community helped in a number of important ways to bring isolationism into disrepute and to turn American opinion against Germany. This, in turn, helped to make it possible for the Roosevelt administration to provide aid to Britain and the Soviet Union and to prepare the United States for war.”18

In Britain, the Anti-Nazi Council and the covert Focus group had been founded with an initial £50,000 from a “secret fund” provided by “leaders of anglo-Jewry” following a meeting at New Court, a residence and the central business premises of the Rothschild family and their financial operations.19 Churchill was invited to visit the USA in the winter of 1936-7 “to launch a parallel American Focus group by giving speeches to prominent figures in New York, Philadelphia and Chicago.” According to David Lough, “The visit was planned by a group of friends led by Jacob Landau, an Austrian-born Jewish journalist, founder of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in London and New York. Churchill marked Landau’s letter ‘Secret’.” Along with the Soviet news agency TASS, the JTA became the main propagator of claims of German atrocities during the war.20 According to David Irving, Churchill was also approached confidentially by the American Jewish Committee, and “had given [his son] Randolph instructions to talk about it with [Bernard] Baruch, the wealthy financier.”21 Churchill’s invitation was cancelled as it was judged too likely to attract undesired publicity, but the American equivalent of the Focus proceeded. In early summer 1939, the Supreme Court judge and Jewish activist Felix Frankfurter visited Churchill. Frankfurter was one of Roosevelt’s “most respected advisers”, a co-founder of the militant American Jewish Congress and an associate of the American Jewish Committee. Speaking of the latter, Irving says that

“Shortly before Frankfurter’s visit to Mr Churchill … there had been meetings to discuss the most seemly manner of spending the $3-million propaganda fund raised by the AJC. … At a second secret meeting in Washington in April 1939, chaired this time by Frankfurter himself, he expressed alarm at the AJC’s ‘present secret and undercover methods’; such methods, he suggested, implied ‘a distrust of the very democracy in which, as Jews, we profess to believe.’

In his view they must either continue to use respectable front organisations — he instanced the Conference of Jews and Christians — or they must use only methods respectable enough to stand investigation.”

If the “undercover methods” were exposed, “‘what capital its enemies would make of such an attempt to mould public opinion in this country!’” After meeting Churchill, Frankfurter wrote that their talk “was one of the most exhilarating experiences I had in England — it made me feel more secure about the future.” He then “wrote to a fellow judge afterward that all his friends in Britain expected war.”22

Atlanticism

“The American journalists knew that the crop of rogue British journalists, thinkers and politicians accumulating around such figures as [Anthony] Eden and the writer Robert Bruce Lockhart could provide them with stories and introductions to the ‘right people’, while the members of the emerging anti-appeasement bloc realized that American sympathy was the key to the future…”30

‘Atlanticism’ might be said to have had its birth in the First World War; if so, by the time Murrow rebased to London, it was an importunate teenager. Reginald Leeper, the fervently anti-German head of the Foreign Office news department, cultivated relationships at work and socially. Cull says that “Valuable work… happened under the auspices of internationalist bodies like the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House).” The RIIA was the British counterpart of the CFR, founded to work to similar purposes. “Murrow first visited London in 1935 as an officer of the International Institute of Education, and retained many internationalist links. Within months of his arrival in 1937 he had addressed the RIIA. Murrow also found eager hosts among pro-American British politicians and soon became an intimate of the emerging anti-Chamberlain circle.”31 That Lord Astor was chairman of the RIIA throughout this period appears not to have detracted from the Cliveden Set myth.

Cull describes the American radio networks as “[t]he only parties to emerge victorious from the Munich crisis” and says that “[t]he correspondents who covered the crisis — Ed Murrow, William Shirer and their colleagues — became household names across the United States.”32 The Soviets and their sympathisers could never have made ‘Munich’ a term for surrender and betrayal in the West; CBS and NBC did it for them. Britain and Europe were thereafter represented to ordinary Americans by a leftist-Jewish alliance representing a tiny, eccentric fraction of American opinion that shared the aims of the Focus. Tiny though it was, though, that fraction had the approval of the President, whereas in Britain the head of government remained an obstacle.

Like Churchill, their means of persuasion consisted primarily of repeated threats against the public. Pro-war British civil servants envisioned how much more they could achieve if Germany could be provoked to attack civilians, perhaps foreseeing what Churchill intended to do if he became head of government. Cull describes how the British Ambassador to the USA, Sir Ronald Lindsay, “appealed for a liberal broadcasting policy in wartime” because, in his words, “If America ever comes into a European war … it will be some violent emotional impulse which will provide the last and decisive thrust. Nothing would be so effective as the bombing of London, translated by air into the homes of America.”33 The existing censorship practices would have ruled out such broadcasts. It had been to Lindsay that Roosevelt, in September 1938, secretly described his plan for goading and luring Germany into attacking Britain.34

As Cull describes, the forming of the trans-Atlantic propaganda network was conscious and deliberate:

“[T]he propaganda planning in the wake of Munich underscored the importance of cooperation with like-minded Americans… The system that emerged blurred the line between British propaganda and American news reporting. … [I] t was a single effort for a single cause … an Anglo-American ‘special relationship of the mind’ was born.”35

Public broadcasting

The British Broadcasting Corporation, a state-controlled broadcasting monopoly, was the nearest equivalent in Britain to the CBS and NBC and had similarly Jewish origins.36 The BBC was founded in 1922 by a board of directors led by Godfrey Isaacs, the well-connected managing director of the Marconi company, supported by Hugo Hirsch of the (British) General Electric Company and advised by a Jewish immigrant from Russia, David Sarnoff, who worked at American Marconi and later, as mentioned, became president of the RCA. Isaacs and Sarnoff both sought dominance of the relevant technology patents for Marconi in the years preceding the founding of the BBC and RCA and used their dominance to impose a model of licence fees and monopoly provision in wireless broadcasting.

Sarnoff was the originator of the statement that ‘public broadcasting’ should inform, educate and entertain. This and the founding of the BBC in general is now widely attributed to John Reith, who was in fact appointed as the BBC’s first general manager by Isaacs’ board. William West describes Reith’s views as “normally of the left”, which appears borne out by the BBC’s history.37 In areas in which the BBC might influence the public on matters of foreign policy, it provided strongly leftist and pro-Jewish views. The Company was prohibited by law from broadcasting news until the evening and was required to use news reported by Reuters and three other wire service providers until 1934, when the BBC began to create its own reports. From 1936, BBC Television broadcast cinema newsreels from Gaumont and Movietone. Movietone was part of Wilhelm Fuchs’ Fox Corporation while Gaumont British was owned by Isidore Ostrer. Ostrer was, according to Nicholas Pronay and Philip Taylor, “the most skilful and clear-minded manipulator of the propaganda potential of the newsreel”; as Gaumont also produced films and owned many cinemas, the effect of his skills was amplified many times over. Fuchs and Ostrer were both descended of Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire.38 The British film industry and cinemas were largely Jewish-owned through the 1920s and 30s.39

“When [the BBC] became a Corporation in 1927, many of the earlier restrictions on ‘controversial’ broadcasting were relaxed. Matheson invited influential and pugnacious figures from the world of politics to speak on air, including Winston Churchill and Harold Nicolson, as well as cultural figures like H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw.”41

Nicolson was not only a guest but the husband of Matheson’s lover, Vita Sackville-West. Beatrice and Sidney Webb were founding Fabians and leading apologists for the Soviet Union during its most tyrannical period. George Bernard Shaw, also a Fabian and Soviet sympathiser, was a strong proponent of racial mixing who cursed and derided ‘anti-Semites’ with the same anti-gentile canards used by The Times in 1882. H G Wells, another defender of the Soviets, was given BBC airtime specifically to advocate for a world state and the eradication of patriotism; the BBC’s own magazine, The Listener, praised Wells, and implicitly the producers who invited him, as men “who can see the future”. Matheson’s “pugnacious figures” also included the Marxist and Zionist Harold Laski (the brother of the head of the Board of Deputies of British Jews), the known Soviet agent E F Wise, the ‘Red Countess’ of Warwick, the Quaker and socialist Philip Noel-Baker, Winston Churchill, Ernest Bevin, the socialist E M Forster, the militant feminist Viscountess Rhondda, and John Maynard Keynes, Leonard Woolf and others of the subversive Bloomsbury Group.

Matheson’s contumacious personality had at first been accommodated at the BBC but became unacceptable to Reith, who has a reputation for having operated autocratically. When Reith, under scrutiny from elements of the press, tried to impose some restraint on Matheson’s pro-Soviet output, she resigned and was replaced with Charles Siepmann, a more judicious leftist. Matheson was then hired in 1939 in a more explicitly propagandistic role: “Director of the Joint Broadcasting Committee, a government-funded venture set up in 1939 which arranged for material about Britain to be broadcast by foreign radio stations.”42 The JBC worked secretly with Guy Burgess who represented MI6’s Section D. “Chamberlain began fighting his secret radio war through Radio Luxembourg and the Joint Broadcasting Committee after Munich” and “it was Burgess who did the work then also”, assisted by Paul Frischauer, a Jewish immigrant from Austria.43 The “radio war” initially consisted of illegally broadcasting Chamberlain speeches into Germany on Radio Luxembourg. West says that “these broadcasts had nothing to do with the BBC”, though the operations had much in common. Radio Luxembourg was owned by Isidore Ostrer and run by Eva Siewert, a Jewish lesbian and Soviet sympathiser.44

Burgess had been a BBC Talks producer under Siepmann; during the Sudetenland crisis of September 1938, he had been the producer responsible for planned anti-German speeches by Harold Nicolson which were cancelled under pressure from the Cabinet Office (loyal to Neville Chamberlain) and the Foreign Office (under Halifax who was still for peace at the time). Producing ostensibly non-political programmes about the countries of the Mediterranean, Burgess also collaborated with the Marxist academic E H Carr and tried to involve Winston Churchill, of whom he was “a keen supporter”, though the latter withdrew in anger at being asked to restrain his bellicosity.45 According to West, “the line followed by Burgess and E H Carr in the BBC’s Mediterranean series was close to [Anthony] Eden’s.”46 Eden, even more than Churchill, was the most prominent Tory supporter of alliance with the Soviet Union, and was particularly friendly to Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet foreign minister. Burgess, before being hired by the BBC at his third attempt, had been recruited to work for the Soviet NKVD by Arnold Deutsch, a cousin of Oscar Deutsch, the founder and owner of Odeon Cinemas and a referee for Arnold’s immigration application.47

It might be too cynical to suggest that Burgess’ resignation from the Communist Party of Great Britain and sham renunciation of communism in 1935 had been carried out at the BBC’s request, though the BBC hired David Aaronovitch during the Cold War in that way.48 At any rate, the compatibility of Burgess’s propaganda with the other output of the BBC is remarkable, and he only resigned, in November 1938, because the government, not the Corporation, thwarted his designs. According to West, “The BBC and its staff… took an essentially Communist line” at the time of the Spanish Civil War which was why “the more sinister activities of Burgess and his circle remained unremarked.”49 By 1941, when Burgess rejoined BBC Talks, the corporation was under the control of Churchill’s government and hired Burgess precisely because he was pro-Soviet. Only while Chamberlain was prime minister was the corporation a somewhat unwelcome place for traitors.

Conflict of philosophies

Simultaneously with politicians, the BBC and much of the press helped aggravate British-German relations. Nevile Henderson, the British ambassador in Berlin, perceived that “parliamentary belligerence was bringing war closer” and that the press was the primary enemy of peace. Maurice Cowling says that Henderson “sensed the situation he had long foreseen in which Jews, journalists and the London intelligentsia would envelop diplomacy in a ‘conflict of philosophies’ which had nothing to do with British interests.”50 Some of the press were pro-Soviet or at least pro-Jewish before Chamberlain became prime minister, and most others, with the fascist-sympathetic Daily Mail excepted, became so in stages over 1938 and 1939.

The leftist Manchester Guardian (now the Guardian) and the Manchester Evening News were under Zionist ownership since their purchase by C P Scott in 1907. Scott was an old friend of Churchill as well as of Chaim Weizmann whom he introduced to David Lloyd George. The Guardian was edited from 1932 to 1944 by W P Crozier, a fervent Zionist.51 Nationalism was promoted for the chosen people and prohibited to gentiles.

Cartoonists were often the most effective antagonists of Anglo-German relations in the press in the years preceding the war, the most prominent being the New Zealand-born leftist David Low of the Evening Standard. Daily Mirror cartoonist Philip Zecanovskya (‘Philip Zec’), son of a Jewish immigrant from Odessa, and Victor Weisz, an immigrant of Hungarian-Jewish descent, who drew for the News Chronicle, the Daily Mirror and the Evening Standard, were more dehumanising where Low was more mocking, but both approaches served to sway a section of the public to despise or dread the fascist leaders, while Stalin only incurred the cartoonists’ wrath when he made the pact with Hitler in 1939. Michael Foot, acting editor at the Standard from 1938 and one of the authors of Guilty Men in 1940, said later that “Low contributed more than any other single figure and as a result changed the atmosphere in the way people saw Hitler.” Neville Chamberlain, speaking to the Newspaper Society in May 1938, said that the anti-German cartoonists did “a great deal to embitter relations” and said that “[t]he bitter cartoons of Low of the Evening Standard have been a frequent source of complaint” by German diplomats, the German propaganda minister Josef Goebbels and Hitler himself.52 Lord Beaverbrook, owner of the Standard, continued to employ Low for his commercial value, occasionally but always temporarily constraining his output.

David Low praised Stalin with faint damnation

Beaverbrook had a mixture of sympathy for Hitler and anger at his regime’s actions. He was also a friend of Ivan Maisky, Robert Vansittart and Churchill, and had run the approving headline ‘Judea declares war on Germany’ in 1933. Churchill chose to make him a minister in his government in 1940. Beaverbrook had written in a private letter in December 1938 that

“The Jews are after Mr. Chamberlain. He is being terribly harassed by them. … All the Jews are against him. … They have got a big position in the press here. … I am shaken. The Jews may drive us into war. … [T]heir political influence is moving us in that direction.”53

Indiscriminate though Beaverbrook’s wording was, over the decades since, historians have chosen to condone or praise Jews for their ‘resistance’ to ‘the Nazis’ rather than dispute such remarks about Jewish influence moving Britain toward war, for which evidence is abundant. The unhidden and evident aim of Jewish activists, from Frankfurter to Weizmann to Lord Rothschild to Robert Waley Cohen, was to use Britain, the USA, the USSR and any and every other nation as instruments to advance Jewish interests as defined by themselves, though typically their case was put in more inoffensive terms.54 If native interests were supplanted or overridden, that was the natives’ problem. It was also true that Jews had “a big position in the press”, if not necessarily in ownership of it. To be in the British press at this time was to have already surrendered to Jewish demands. The Daily Mail was among the best read newspapers in the world when it began to support the British Union of Fascists, the main organisation in Britain opposing war and Marxism, in early 1934. The Mail reversed course in July of the same year under the threat of a boycott by Jewish advertisers led by directors of Unilever; that the threat worked reveals more about the orientation of the press, advertising, and related industries than would any analysis of ownership by ancestry or religion. That most historians have complaisantly avoided explaining the about-turn of the ‘Daily Heil’ or the apparent lack of resistance from Lord Rothermere suggests that the threats against him were the tip of a greater, more enduring iceberg; Henry Ford’s ship had been holed in similar fashion in 1927, long before ‘the Nazis’ came to power.

Beaverbrook’s letter spoke of “the Jews” carelessly. He referred to the News Chronicle as the Jews Chronicle, probably because it was “virulently opposed to Fascism in any country”, but it was controlled by the Cadbury brothers, who were Quakers.55 Though ostensibly against war, Quakers tended to support the anti-fascist cause, which was of Jewish and communist origin and conduced toward Jewish power. Perhaps the Chronicle appealed to a section of Quakers only opposed to war in the sense of fighting it themselves. As Maurice Cowling describes, the Chronicle, edited by Focus member Walter Layton, spent 1939 highlighting

“…divisions in the government and implied that Chamberlain had lost his following. It was virulently nasty about the Nazis and was the newspaper of which the Nazi leaders complained most regularly. … Its celebrations of Benes, Russia and the League got under Chamberlain’s skin.”56

Layton had, until 1938, been the editor of the Economist, primarily owned by Brendan Bracken and Henry Strakosch, close associates and supporters of Churchill and the Focus. Walter Citrine, head of the Trade Unions Congress and a director of the Labour-aligned Daily Herald, had been a stalwart of the Focus and its pre-Churchill incarnation, the Anti-Nazi Council, since the founding of each. The editors of the Spectator, New Statesman and Time and Tide had been recruited to the Focus by the end of 1936, and unnamed BBC executives had attended Focus meetings from the start. Norman Angell of the Focus used his columns in Time and Tide to help Claud Cockburn meme the Cliveden Set into apparent reality.57

The more Chamberlain was vilified and lampooned, the more aggressively was Churchill promoted by the same forces. As Martin Gilbert describes, in February and March 1939,

“the illustrated magazine Picture Post … in two successive issues called for Churchill to be brought back into government. … The articles owed much to the vision of the editor and designer of Picture Post, Stefan Lorant, a Hungarian Jew who in 1919, at the age of eighteen, had fled the anti-Semitic atmosphere of Admiral Horthy’s regime and gone to Germany, where he became a pioneer of illustrated magazines. In 1933 Lorant had been imprisoned by the Nazis in Dachau for six months, before intervention by the Hungarian Government led to his release. His book I Was Hitler’s Prisoner, published in 1935, was one of the first accounts in English of the concentration camp system.”

Lorant, born Istvan Reich, was among the many Jews who joined Bela Kun’s communist regime in Hungary in 1918 and provoked the “anti-Semitic atmosphere” that followed.58 The practice of referring to failed usurpers, revolutionaries and traitors who opt for exile instead of justice or retribution as ‘refugees from fascism’ is misleading but a useful gauge of the worth or intent of historians. Lorant, like Cockburn, is widely agreed to have been a habitual liar; the aggressive promotion of his books habituated a herdish portion of the British public to stop discriminating between reality and fiction, which served the warmongers later.59 That his partly fictional account of imprisonment in Germany remains well-known today while nothing comparable in regard to Soviet slavery became famous until Solzhenitsyn’s work, released deep into the Cold War, suggests that the publishing industry of the 1930s was probably of similar ethno-political character to that of movies and newsreels.

As Gilbert describes, Picture Post seeded the myth of Churchill as an unappreciated wise man awaiting the call of destiny. “Lorant spent a day at Chartwell, with a photographer, talking to Churchill and working out how best to present the call for his return to government. The two issues of Picture Post that followed Lorant’s visit marked a turning point in the public perception of Churchill as a man whose knowledge and experience were not being used. The first issue was published on 25 February 1939 with text by Henry Wickham Steed, a former editor of The Times and a member of the Anti-Nazi League [the Focus]. Its theme: ‘The greatest moment of his life is yet to come.’”60

The photographer was Kurt Hutton (born Kurt Hubschmann), one of several Jewish and/or communist photographers from Germany who, as Owen Hatherley describes, had moved to work in Britain illegally at Lorant’s invitation “under new pseudonyms designed to disguise their foreignness”. Felix H Man (born Hans Baumann) said that this was “so that British readers wouldn’t realise ‘the backbone of the paper consisted of foreigners’.” Gerti Deutsch changed her name by marrying the assistant editor and Lorant’s trusted collaborator, Tom Hopkinson. Her first piece for Picture Post celebrated the immigration of Jewish children into Britain under the ‘kindertransport’ scheme instigated by Lola Hahn-Warburg, member of the Warburg international banking family and a lover of Chaim Weizmann, the leading Zionist activist and friend of Winston Churchill.

Several of Lorant’s associates pointedly included nudity and sexual suggestiveness in their work. Zoltan Glass was Lorant’s co-founder of Liliput magazine and a pornographer. Hatherley describes Liliput as “indebted to the press culture of the Weimar Republic” and, alongside “naked ladies” and “soft porn” it included a regular “juxtaposition of Neville Chamberlain—a bête noire of Lorant’s for his appeasement of Hitler—with a gormless, harmless Llama” which “was referenced in Parliament in an attack on the Prime Minister. … [I]n 1940, [Lorant] would package the best of the juxtapositions together in a book entitled Chamberlain and the Beautiful Llama.” Hatherley continues: “Perhaps more seriously, in 1939, spreads were published in Lilliput of John Heartfield’s scathing anti-fascist montages—the first time they had been seen in Britain (Heartfield, escaping from Prague, was newly arrived in London).” Heartfield (born Helmut Herzfeld) was a “strident Communist”.

Liliput’s contribution to the debate

Like Lord Beaverbrook, the owner of Picture Post, Edward Hulton, was a Tory in his own views but content to allow his employees to preach socialism. Tom Hopkinson said that “for Lorant and myself the main interest was that [the magazine] should be strongly political, ‘anti-fascist’ in the language of the time.” Lorant had asked in regard to the National Socialists in Germany “how do I hit back at these bastards?” The Soviets were never “bastards” to Lorant, and no crime of theirs ever provoked him to “hit back”. Any pretence of sympathy with the underdog was a sham. However, Lorant was astute in realising the commercial and propaganda value of such a pretence. As he said when questioned on the amount of space given to pictures of ordinary people,

“Picture Post believes in the ordinary man and woman; thinks they have had no fair share in picture journalism; believes their faces are more striking, their lives and doings more full of interest than those of the people whose faces and activities cram the ordinary picture papers. This goes for dictators and debutantes equally.”61

Picture Post in June 1939

Picture Post was immensely popular. Richard Cockett says that

“those daily papers that attacked Chamberlain’s government, most notably the Daily Mirror in its peculiarly strident fashion, quickly attracted a wide audience. All this pointed to the fact, acknowledged by many journalists at the time, that the press was not reflecting public opinion and that those journals which did set out to articulate the dissatisfaction felt about the contemporary situation were thus bound to do well — as indeed they did.”62

That anti-fascism, specifically, aroused the public at large is probably more Cockett’s wish than his analysis. As the press had tended not to reflect public opinion on any matter, the market was open to those who appeared to do so. Beaverbrook and Rothermere were effective as businessmen but inconsistent and unfocused as mediators, populists or ideologues. Other than Picture Post, few publications printed, alongside news concerning famous or powerful people, the photographs of everyday life that ordinary Britons appear to have found familiar and pleasing. Lorant guilefully presented Picture Post as a voice of common folk, enabling him to plausibly portray anti-fascism as a popular reaction against the heartless or foolish elites and the Cliveden Set; thereby he created unique propaganda opportunities. According to Cockett,

“By the beginning of the war, the circulation of the Daily Mirror had risen … to over one million seven hundred and fifty thousand. The Sunday Pictorial [having the same owners as the Mirror] … by 1939 was selling over two million copies. The Picture Post magazine … had seen its circulation rise … to one million three hundred and fifty thousand and by the beginning of the war was … second only to the Radio Times in its popularity as a weekly magazine. Both of these publications owed their success as much to their revolution in style and mood as they did to their politics, but it was nonetheless a good indication of the market that existed for the politics of bellicose anti-Hitlerism.”63

War cloud seeding

The best stimulus for such politics was fear of German aggression, in the creation of which ‘anti-Hitlerists’ specialised. According to Wesley Wark, the eleven months preceding Britain’s declaration of war on Germany in September 1939 were “filled with alarms and constantly changing predictions of where Hitler might strike.”64 As few of the public thought that the media, which cited ‘official sources’, would lie so persistently, repetition (with slight variations) had the desired effect, and lessons learned from earlier attempts could be used to make later ones more penetrating.

When honest sources were found too nuanced to reliably provoke the desired state of dread, they had to be drowned out. According to John Charmley, “The rumours of November [1938], coming from Carl Goerdeler, an opponent of the Nazi regime who had contacts in military circles, had spoken of Hitler’s hostility towards Britain but had confirmed Foreign Office suspicions that German expansionism was aimed eastwards”. Then, in December,

“there came fresh information — this time that London was to be bombed in the near future. The man carrying this dramatic news, Ivone Kirkpatrick, had just returned from being Henderson’s deputy in Berlin, and his source assured him that his news came from the German War Office. As MI5 had picked up similar rumours, there appeared to be legitimate cause for alarm.”65

MI5’s concurrence should not have conferred legitimacy. According to William West, in the 1930s it was “relatively unusual in MI5” to be “as determined an enemy of Communism as … of Fascism.”66 Hilda Matheson, the subversive BBC Talks executive, was an MI5 agent in the First World War; MI5 staff today call her a “lesbian role model”.67 Both MI5 and MI6 were influenced by, drew upon and overlapped with the private intelligence operations run by Robert Vansittart of the Foreign Office and his fellow anti-German, Lord Lloyd of the British Council, who were given access to secret MI6 reports.68 Vansittart’s Z organisation was widely known in Germany and was not so much infiltrated by as warmly welcoming to Jewish emigres, communists and other opponents of Hitler.69 The organisation’s output suggests that the sole criteria for accepting or rejecting information was whether it could be used to foment panic or “bellicose anti-Hitlerism” in Britain and provoke the government to take escalating and ever more irreversible retaliatory measures. As Charmley describes:

“Vansittart’s information came from anti-Nazi elements inside Germany, who were very anxious to impress upon the British Government the need to fight Hitler; as Professor Watt has commented: ‘much of the misinformation was spread deliberately by elements seeking to manipulate the British Government’. This was particularly true of the spate of rumours which had marked late 1938 and early 1939. It was, perhaps, merely fortuitous that these ‘scare stories’ had all concerned German attacks westwards, thus arousing in Halifax and others anxieties that earlier fables about German designs on the Ukraine had failed to raise — but a better explanation than mere chance is on offer. ‘Vansittart’s Germanophobes’, as [rearmament minister Thomas] Inskip called them, included members of the anti-Hitler elements in the German General Staff. Their attempt to persuade the British that Hitler was determined to go to war over Czechoslovakia had been frustrated in 1938 by Chamberlain’s dramatic seizure of the initiative; having failed to get action by telling the truth about Hitler’s designs, it seems, in Watt’s trenchant words, ‘a reasonable supposition that [they] … decided to doctor the reports so as to trick the British at their most sensitive spot’ — the fear of a surprise attack on London. They also challenged the confidence of [Foreign Office minister Richard] Butler’s definition of German policy as being ‘Bluff West. Infiltrate East’. By making it appear that Britain was herself in the firing line, they stimulated the Staff talks with the French, which were enormously to increase the pressure on Chamberlain to commit himself to a full-scale continental war.”70

British staff talks (and the entente) with the French, jointly preparing for a war which Germany tried to avoid, were also among the causes of the First World War.

The anti-German faction in the Foreign Office complemented the work of Vansittart’s false intelligence mill. Senior diplomat Gladwyn Jebb reported to the Foreign Policy Committee in January 1939 that “All our sources are at one in declaring that [Hitler] … is barely sane, consumed by an insensate hatred of this country, and capable of ordering an immediate aerial attack on any European country and of having this command instantly obeyed.” After eight years of Vansittart’s leadership of the Foreign Office, Britain’s ‘Rolls Royce civil service’ was chauffeured by hysterics and scoundrels.71

Charmley says that in January 1939, fresh rumours

“indicated that Holland and/or Belgium were in danger … Halifax again took a more gloomy view of [the rumours] than some of his colleagues. … [T]he Cabinet concurred with the view … that it was impossible to ignore the reports. … [T]he Chiefs of Staff were asked to consider whether an attack upon Holland constituted a casus belli for Britain.”72

The Netherlands was thus employed in 1939 as Belgium had been in 1914.

Watt says that “Chamberlain dominated his Cabinet, or all but one member of it. This was his close friend, Edward Wood, Viscount Halifax, the Foreign Secretary.”73 The conversion of Halifax, and Vansittart’s successor, Alexander Cadogan, to the Vansittart line over the winter of 1938–9 was a crucial achievement for the war party. Both began to utter the same canards as Churchill, Lloyd and others, with the same Disraelite disregard for the limits of finance, as Cowling describes:

“In mid-November [Halifax] gave the Cabinet Committee a lurid account of Hitler’s determination to destroy the Empire and the need to encourage ‘moderate elements’ in Germany by correcting the ‘false impression that we were … spineless’. Having failed then to persuade Chamberlain to accept the first steps towards Conscription, he tried again in January with accounts of the extent to which ‘the financial and economic condition of Germany was … compelling the mad Dictator … to insane adventures’. In early February he told the Cabinet that he would ‘sooner be bankrupt in peace than beaten in a war against Germany’.”74

Halifax was affected by “doubt and disaffection … spreading among junior ministers, ‘the young’ and ‘the best traditional elements’ in the Foreign Office and Conservative party of which [the previous Foreign Secretary Anthony] Eden was claiming that Halifax alone had not turned against Chamberlain.”75 Chamberlain’s erstwhile allies in the Cabinet thus converted, he could amid each subsequent panic be portrayed as an old stick-in-the-mud lamentably obstructing what needed to be done.

Eden and Halifax

By February 1939, Halifax was the “principal guest” at a “strictly private” lunch with the Focus and several Labour MPs, whom he impressed.76 Presumably, he was unaware of the full range of his hosts’ activities. David Irving describes how Britain was inveigled in offering a guarantee to Romania:

“Two days after [the German occupation of] Prague, the Romanian minister in London, Viorel Tilea — intimate friend of the Focus — told Lord Halifax that Germany had issued an ‘ultimatum’ to his government. Bucharest, astonished, denied the ultimatum, but Tilea stuck to his story. Robert Boothby would brag a few days later … that he had himself ‘entirely invented’ the story: he had called on the legation to obtain a visa, Tilea had mentioned that Germany was asking Romania to concentrate more on agriculture, and he had persuaded Tilea to tell the [Foreign Office] that this was an ‘ultimatum.’ He himself had then sold the story to the newspapers. According to a German intercept, Tilea admitted [that] he had ‘made the utmost possible use of his instructions.’ Whatever the background, he shortly retired a wealthy man … and maintained a monastic silence until his death. The foreign office took note that among Tilea’s effects in January 1941 was a pound of solid gold. … Chamberlain began drafting a Four Power declaration to be signed by Britain, France, Poland and Russia, to ‘act together in the event of further signs of German aggressive ambitions.’”77

That draft was later amended to exclude the Soviets, but Chamberlain was gradually being forced to treat them as partners and to make the independence of countries to the east of Germany a matter of policy, a drastic departure from any rational conception of British interests. As Cowling says,

“There was … both a stick and a carrot. The stick, bent from the beginning, consisted of Conscription, the isolation of Germany and guarantees to Poland, Greece, Denmark, Holland and Switzerland. The carrot continued to be frontier revision in Poland and elsewhere and economic agreement once Hitler had come to see that nothing would be gained by force which might not be gained more securely by negotiation.”78

Chamberlain acting freely would never have arrived at such a position. It was a compromise with a Cabinet, Parliament and media largely united in opposition to him even before the German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia in late March, which gravely wounded the cause of peace in Britain.

Chamberlain’s stick amounted to part of what the Focus and the Soviet Foreign Ministry had long sought: encirclement of Germany. The guarantees to Germany’s neighbours

“were like tripwires. As Iverach McDonald, diplomatic correspondent of The Times, would later write, they were justified in the eyes of a growing number of Tory MPs and journalists for one simple and overriding reason: ‘The sooner that war came the better.’”79

The war party found effective the use of several kinds of panic at once. Charmley says that the assertion of the Secretary for War, Leslie Hore-Belisha, on 21st March 1939,

“that Germany was massing her troops in the west, compounded with stories of attacks on Lithuania and air raids on London, caused Chamberlain acute anxiety. Logic told him that not all the stories could be true, but dealing with a ‘fanatic’ made for uncertainty, and precautions were taken against air and submarine attacks.”80

‘Germany’ was made to sound like an alarm and ‘Russia’ like a lullaby; merely by existing, the Soviets were safeguarding Europe. Churchill wrote on March 24th that “[t]he loyal attitude of the Soviets to the cause of peace, and their obvious interest in resisting the Nazi advance to the Black Sea, impart a feeling of encouragement to all the Eastern States now menaced by the maniacal dreams of Berlin.”81 Churchill was less outspoken about the ‘feelings imparted’ when he secretly approved the Soviet “advance to the Black Sea” and control of the “Eastern States” with Stalin in Moscow in 1944.

Chamberlain continued to try to avoid outright alliance with the Soviets. Irving says that the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Horace Wilson,

“…would recall, writing in October 1941, Mr Chamberlain could not believe that the Soviet policy was anything but selfish — ‘mixed with a strong desire to see civilised Europe ruined by a conflict between England and Germany.’ And, he continued, nothing the Russians did up to the time of his death suggested to Chamberlain that he was mistaken.”82

Halifax, however, had lost all judgement. By the spring of 1939 he “regarded the ‘real issue’ as being ‘Germany’s attempt to obtain world domination’,” and he “was prepared to equate Romania and Holland as being of equal interest from Britain’s point of view.”83 Cadogan, his permanent secretary, agreed.84 It did not matter “that there was ‘probably no way in which France or ourselves could prevent Poland and Romania from being overrun’, [Halifax] still thought that if he had to choose between ‘doing nothing, or entering into a devastating war’, he would prefer the latter as the lesser evil.”85 Why Halifax expected a fate worse than devastation from the continuance of peace remains obscure.

Ian Colvin, a correspondent for the News Chronicle, contributed more than any other journalist to the series of alarmist fabrications used to wreck Chamberlain’s foreign policy. Irving describes Colvin as being “used by anti-Nazi elements in Berlin as a vehicle for scare stories” since January 1938, when “Colvin had alleged that Hitler planned to invade Czechoslovakia that spring; after the November pogrom, he had described a ‘speech’ made by Hitler to three foreign ministry officials setting out his aversion to Britain and Chamberlain, and describing how he was going to get rid of the Jews, the churches and private industry in Germany (there was no such speech).”86

In late January 1939, Watt says, Colvin

“reported to Lord Lloyd that German military preparations included the possibility of an attack on Poland in March. In this, as we have seen, he was premature and wrong. But this did nothing to destroy confidence in him. Throughout February he continued to maintain that Hitler was planning to attack Poland at the end of March.”87

In late March of 1939, Colvin brought Cadogan “the dramatic news that Germany had ‘everything ready’ for a ‘swoop on Poland’, which was to be followed by similar action against the Baltic republics after which, with a Russian alliance in his pocket, Hitler would turn his attention to the British Empire”. Cadogan took Colvin to Halifax who took him to Chamberlain.88

Watt calls Colvin’s information “a concoction of accurate information and grossly exaggerated inference, and the inference supplied to him, also in the guise of information, was clearly deliberately exaggerated to produce the maximum effect on the recipient. … [T]he intention of the individual or individuals who fed this misleading information to the British was clearly to provoke Britain into some major action to oppose, block, restrain or thwart the Führer.”89 Chamberlain was, by then, unable to avoid the demands of his opponents led by Halifax, and he announced the guarantee of Polish independence, which he intended as a temporary, conditional measure to forestall an attack he had been led to believe was imminent.

As “British Tories had become the guarantors of Bolshevism”, the anti-fascist press were free to raise their demands.90 The “News Chronicle, Daily Worker, Manchester Guardian, Daily Mirror and more reluctantly the Daily Herald all threw caution to the wind and championed the cause of Anglo-Soviet solidarity immediately the Polish guarantee was announced on 31 March.”91

Re-encirclement

“British reports” on German public opinion began to note “that the cry of encirclement was meeting with a large measure of success.”92 By mid-April, by offering guarantees in eastern Europe, “Halifax had reduced himself and his Government” to a “ludicrous position” wherein Britain lost its freedom to act, Germany was aggrieved and the Soviets grew ever more secure. As Patrick Buchanan says, “Stalin’s relief and joy can only be imagined.”93

By rewarding the war scares, Chamberlain and Halifax emboldened the stories’ inventors and beneficiaries. The same applied in Washington. William Bullitt, the American ambassador in Paris and a trusted source of intelligence for Roosevelt, could be relied upon to take every alarming report to the receptive president provided that Germany or its friends were the purported aggressors; in the first half of April, France, Gibraltar, Britain, Yugoslavia, Poland, Danzig, Egypt, Syria and Morocco all narrowly avoided imaginary attacks.94

The repetitious creation of panic and the demands of the war party succeeded in escalating tension, bellicosity and material preparations for war. As West says,

“On 26 April, Chamberlain announced that he was introducing conscription. In doing so he scrapped a policy, first enunciated by Baldwin in 1936, that Britain would never introduce conscription in peace time and repeated by Chamberlain himself not four weeks before. The reason for Chamberlain’s action, as he clearly stated when confronted by Attlee with this volte face, was that the guarantees given to Poland and Rumania together with the new conditions meant that mobilization could not wait on the formal declaration of war.”95

Hitler’s response, two days later, was to cancel the Anglo-German naval agreement “which had been the token of Britain and Germany’s never going to war in the famous ‘scrap of paper’ signed after Munich and, on the Polish front, by annulling the German-Polish non-aggression pact. This, coupled with Chamberlain’s speech on conscription, moved Europe to the very brink of war.”96

Peace still hung by threads. The war party resorted to sabotaging efforts to assuage the hostility developing between Britain and Germany. As West describes, Hitler’s speech responding to Chamberlain’s announcement of conscription contained criticisms of British and American foreign policy which might have resonated with audiences in those countries and complicated the Foreign Office picture of the “barely sane” man “consumed by insensate hatred”.

“A translation on this occasion was distributed directly from the Anglo-German Information Service in London and shortly after published as a pamphlet, printed in Germany. The translation of previous Hitler speeches appearing in The Times and elsewhere had been edited, frequently quite severely; who was responsible for this is not clear. The authorities in Britain allowed the dissemination of these speeches when they were printed in Germany, but shortly after the Anglo-German Information Service began to have them printed in England and the Director, Dr Roessel, and members of his staff were then expelled from the country. No explanation of these complex affairs has ever been forthcoming.”97

Associates of Reginald Leeper, the Foreign Office’s main propagandist, a payee of the Czech government, fervently anti-German and the man who introduced Churchill to the Focus, should be suspected. Early in 1939, George Ogilvie-Forbes of the British embassy in Berlin, who was anti-Hitler but against war, tried to persuade the Foreign Office to agree with the German foreign ministry’s proposal for an Anglo-German Cultural Agreement to improve relations. Reginald Leeper received the suggestion and was “totally opposed” to it, describing it as a “totalitarian technique” and advising Ogilvie-Forbes to reject the idea in a way that would not “give Ribbentrop an excuse for his anti-British venom.”98

World peace

“Before coming to the microphone the Duke went on a tour of the burial grounds at Verdun, looking at the graves of the hundreds of thousands of men who had been killed there. He made it plain that he was speaking on behalf of those dead whose graves he had visited that day:

‘I speak for no one but myself…. I speak simply as a soldier of the last war whose most earnest prayer it is that such cruel and destructive madness shall never again overtake mankind. I break my self-imposed silence now only because of the manifest danger that we may all be drawing nearer a repetition of the grim events which happened a quarter of a century ago. … We … know that in modern warfare victory will only lie with the powers of evil.’”

The Duke called for

“the discouragement of all that harmful propaganda which, from whatever source it comes, tends to poison the minds of the people of the world. I personally deplore, for example, the use of such terms as ‘encirclement” and ‘aggression’.”

He concluded:

“The World has not yet recovered from the effects of the last carnage. The greatest success that any Government could achieve for its own national policy would be nothing in comparison with the triumph of having contributed to save humanity from the terrible threat which threatens it today.”

West says that Chamberlain appears to have been “greatly influenced away from war at exactly this time” and “turned his back firmly on all the alarmists around him and [shook] himself free from the frame of mind where even the rumours of a 26-year-old News Chronicle reporter had brought him to thinking that war was imminent.”

According to West, the speech “was heard by over 400,000,000 people all over the world”, but

“has remained almost entirely unknown in Britain since it was banned by the BBC. The exact circumstances of the ban are obscure. The BBC at first referred the matter to Buckingham Palace but was directed by them to 10 Downing Street. It appears that, after consultation at the highest level, the BBC decided to agree to impose its ban.”100

Edward, Duke of Windsor, the abdicated king

The BBC’s executives might have shivered at the Duke of Windsor’s mention of “poisoning minds”, for who else did he mean but the likes of Matheson, Burgess or Churchill? Vansittart, according to Richard Cockett, was affronted when Chamberlain’s Cabinet Secretary, Horace Wilson, visited the BBC’s news editor, Robert Clark, in May 1939, “to accuse the broadcasters of ‘making people believe that war is inevitable and encouraging a war-mentality’”.101

The BBC’s motto was that ‘nation shall speak peace unto nation’. Germany must have been less than a nation, but the corporation spoke peace to Stalin, who by terror ruled more nations than had Genghis Khan. Winston Churchill also spoke peace and a lot more to the communists. He suggested in the Daily Telegraph on 8th June “the creation of a grand alliance between Britain, France and Russia”.102 Richard Cockett says that “Ivan Maisky, the Soviet Ambassador to Britain, now became a particularly welcome and ever present figure in journalistic circles and saw most of the editors and proprietors privately to discuss the possibilities of an alliance”.103 Chamberlain was “subjected to a mounting tide of public pressure orchestrated from behind the scenes, as MI5’s telephone tapping revealed to Chamberlain’s disgust and contempt, by the ubiquitous M. Maisky. … In the Commons on May 19, Chamberlain was subjected to heavy and well-informed pressure, Maisky having briefed Churchill carefully before the debate began.”104

Maisky and Churchill

“What price Churchill?”

To have Churchill invited to the Cabinet, which Chamberlain would only do under duress, and to have British policy directed solely against Germany, was the main task of the Focus. In late June, Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan and Harold Nicolson visited newspaper editors to persuade them to support Halifax against Chamberlain in pursuit of his “devastating war” and, to that end, the inclusion of Churchill and Eden. The normally pro-Tory Telegraph’s owner Lord Camrose was close to supporting war by the time Churchill called for the Soviet alliance in his pages, and was converted decisively by the visit of Eden and co. Lord Astor, the owner of the Observer, one of Claud Cockburn’s supposed Nazi sympathisers, had already been for Churchill joining the Cabinet “for some time” and “wanted Conscription and a Russian alliance.” Lord Kemsley, owner of the Sunday Times, had also joined the war party. The Times, owned by Lord Astor’s brother John Jacob Astor V, especially its editor Geoffrey Dawson, continued to support Chamberlain.

With all but The Times on side, from July 2nd a co-ordinated campaign for Churchill to join the Cabinet began in the Observer, the Guardian, the Telegraph, the Yorkshire Post, the Mirror, the Evening News, the Star, the News Chronicle, the Sunday Graphic, the Daily Worker and the Daily Mail.105

Felix Frankfurter finished his visit to Churchill at this time, and the Focus then began “an extravagant publicity campaign … on Churchill’s behalf.” Churchill pleaded successfully with Eugen Spier, the founder and first funder of the Focus, to refrain from publishing a book on the secret group until after Churchill’s death. In his own memoirs, Churchill claimed to have had “nothing to do” with the “[t]housands of enormous posters … displayed for weeks on end on metropolitan hoardings, ‘Churchill must come back’” or the “[s]cores of young volunteer men and women [carrying] sandwich-board placards with similar slogans up and down before the House of Commons.” Plausible deniability, and some distance from the organisers, was indeed prudent for someone affecting to be brought back to the Cabinet by popular clamour. As David Irving describes,

“Mysterious agents rented advertising hoardings — a typical one photographed on July 24 in The Strand bore only three huge words: WHAT PRICE CHURCHILL? By rumours, innuendo and outright statement, Fleet-street suggested he was actually about to return; newspaper editorials and readers’ letters debated the issue.

It was the Daily Telegraph which started this great paper chase on July 3. ‘No step,’ argued this, the flagship of Lord Camrose, ‘would more profoundly impress the Axis powers with the conviction that this country means business.’”

The kind of advert where the advertisers don’t identify themselves

Nor would any step do more to convince the Comintern and the NKVD that their efforts had all been worthwhile. Irving remarks that “[t]his virtual editorial unanimity was impressive, not to say unique. Several diplomats suspected that it was orchestrated.”106 Perhaps those diplomats recognised the involvement of one of their own kind. “Chamberlain… detected in the agitation a conspiracy involving the Soviet ambassador — his sources reported that Maisky was in close touch with Winston’s son.” Maisky was, as seen, also in close touch with much of the press and Parliament. The American embassy had “seen periodic agitation for Churchill earlier, but never on such a scale. … [T]he German ambassador ascribed it to dissidents trying to subvert the cabinet and sabotage its constructive policies on Germany — ‘mainly Anglo-Jewish circles with the Churchill group in their wake.’” As historians have shown near-unanimous disinterest in the source of funding for such a campaign, the New Court “secret fund” and the Focus must be the prime suspects.

Chamberlain held out for good reason. “On July 8, after a visit from the Australian high commissioner, the prime minister wrote to his sister that the Dominions thought like him  that if Winston was in the government, ‘it would not be long before we were at war.’” That was the intention of Churchill’s supporters. Perhaps Chamberlain was too decent to suspect it. Probably only a clear-eyed and determined effort could have prevented the regime change operation aimed at him. Such an effort was never mustered. As the Frankfurters and Waley Cohens worked with acute intent, determination and vast resources, the guardians of peace failed to co-ordinate, prepare or stand their ground, and with only moderate persistence their ward was murdered.

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