Ian Kershaw: Making Friends with Hitler

The New York Sun, December 2, 2004

Ian Kershaw is best known for "Hitler," his two-volume, definitive account of one of history's monsters. His new book, by contrast, deals with an irritating British nobleman who was at best a footnote, at worst a nonentity. In telling the strange, sad story of the lord who tried to befriend a fuhrer, Mr. Kershaw highlights the English ineptitude that was to prove so helpful to the German dictator throughout the 1930s. "Making Friends With Hitler" (The Penguin Press, 488 pages, $29.95) also comes with a disturbing contemporary resonance. In part it's a tale of people living in the comfort of Western democracy, but all too ready to excuse totalitarian savagery overseas in the interest of their own ideological obsessions. Those people still exist: Chomsky, Sarandon, Moore, take your pick.

The exhaustingly, and slightly repetitively, named Charles Stewart Henry Vane-Tempest-Stewart, the 7th Marquess of Londonderry, was born into immense wealth and an even larger sense of entitlement. He was also born too late. By the time he became a member of Parliament, the old aristocratic order was beginning to crumble, and by the time he returned home from the trenches of the World War I, Britain was only a few years from its first Labour government.

Oblivious or uncaring, this self-important but not very talented aristocrat still felt high office was his right. The viceroyalty of India eluded his grasp, but in the end perseverance, connections, and aggressive entertaining produced their reward: In effect, Londonderry catered his way into the Cabinet, becoming Britain's Air Minister in 1931. As was said, a touch acidly, about one of his earlier, equally dubious, promotions, it was not possible to "use a man's hospitality and not give him a job."

Maybe, but the early 1930s were not the best time to put a mediocrity into such a role. As minister in charge of the air force he had somehow to reconcile Britain's security requirements with increasingly assertive demands from Germany for strategic parity. All this at a time when most Britons were still calling for disarmament and the exchequer was short of spare cash.

It was a task for which Londonderry was neither intellectually nor temperamentally equipped. As Mr. Kershaw explains, "having imbibed the aristocratic values of Victorian and Edwardian England" he was "totally unprepared for the rough, tough, world of the 1930s ... where the mailed fist and political thuggery were what counted."

But if he was unprepared, so was his country, and that parallel, I suspect, was Mr. Kershaw's point in choosing to make this minor figure the focus of such a major study. Mr. Kershaw treats Londonderry as a symbol of the failures of Britain's governing class; the story of his undeserved rise and precipitate fall is used to tell the wider tale of his country's disastrous failure to head off Hitler.

The problem is that Londonderry was not a particularly representative figure. While his story (which Mr. Kershaw, as one would expect, tells well) is of interest, it is as a curiosity more than anything else - "Believe It or Not" rather than "The Gathering Storm." This is a book for readers who enjoy the byways and the detours of history, and the tales of those who can be found there.

Those wanting a general account of British foreign policy in that "low dishonest decade" should thus look elsewhere. They will be frustrated by the amount of time he spends with Londonderry, a man who lost what little significance he had when he was fired, somewhat unfairly, from government. He then compounded his unimportance by alienating many of the few who could be bothered to pay him any attention.

Had Londonderry gone quietly into retirement, Mr. Kershaw would not have much to say, but instead the fallen minister began the freelance diplomacy that shattered what was left of his reputation. In the hands of a lesser historian, these efforts, designed to promote a more friendly relationship between the Third Reich and Britain, could have been caricatured as the acts of a Nazi sympathizer, even a potential Quisling. Mr. Kershaw recognizes that Londonderry's motives were patriotic and basically well intentioned.

Friendship between Britain and Germany was, this veteran of the Somme believed, essential if the tragedy of another Great War was to be avoided. This was very different from supporting Hitler, or working to establish some sinister New Order in the sceptr'd isle. Even the photographs that illustrate this book under line the distance between Londonderry and the gangsters he was attempting to cultivate: We see him, Savile Row immaculate, posing with Hitler, being entertained by Goring, alongside his houseguest von Ribbentrop. In each picture, this British aristocrat seems guarded, a little uneasy, a thoroughly decent chap not altogether comfortable with the rough company he is keeping.

Certainly some of Londonderry's effusions about Hitler's "tremendous successes" make for very queasy reading. But, to put this into better context, Mr. Kershaw could have included some discussion of the useful idiots who were, at the same time, busy proclaiming the birth of a new civilization in Stalin's slaughterhouse Soviet Union. By comparison with such apologists, Londonderry was relatively restrained in the praise of his dictator. He shared with them, however, their determination to give evil the benefit of every doubt. And like them he lacked much empathy with those unfortunate enough to live under totalitarianism.

We see this most strikingly in Londonderry's underwhelming response to the plight of Germany's Jews. To be sure, he shared in the clubland anti-Semitism of many of his class, but this was a far cry from sympathy for Nazi cruelty. It appears to have been enough to let him regard Hitler's relentlessly grinding pogrom primarily as bad PR, an unnecessary obstacle to the necessary friendship between Britain and Germany. The idea that such horrors might have been evidence of a regime so pathological it could be no more trusted abroad than at home seem not to have occurred to him until too late.

Fortunately, there were others who did understand - none more so than his cousin, Winston Churchill. Relations between the two became, apparently, a little strained.