War and Propaganda
Secret History: British Non-aggression Pact with Hitler
Abstract
Can we Trust Our Leaders? Shameful History
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.George Santayana
Original articles lightly edited. Freely distribute
Contents Updated: Tuesday, 26 September 2006, Friday, 2 October 2009
British Peace Talks with Germany
We hear constantly that Saddam invaded Kuwait because he had had the nod of approval from the US, or at least an assurance they would look away at the time it happened. It seems Hitler made a similar mistake in 1939, believing the British would not fight over Poland. The idea that he meant to have a war with France and Britain when Germany invaded Poland is wrong. Hitler was confident that the British and French would not intervene to save Poland and was shocked when the declaration of war came. After the British ultimatum had arrived, Ribbentrop wondered, despairingly, “What are we to do now?” and Hitler, meeting him in the Reichstag building, griped:
You idiot! You told me this wouldn’t happen.
Only six weeks earlier the British government had indicated they were reluctant to go to war. Far from standing up to Hitler, they had instead offered him African colonies, a share of British trade, and—by some accounts—a large cash loan to entice him towards peace.
Towards the end of July 1939, a German civil servant and chief economic adviser to Göring, Wohltat, arrived in London. He was running the four-year plan, and was an important figure, since Göring was believed to be wholly against war. He came to London in June and again in mid July, as German delegate to the International Whaling Conference. From 18 July to 21, he held informal conversations with several important British politicians.
Each side was adamant that it was the other that initiated these conversations. Sir Horace Wilson, chief economic adviser to the government, and a close confidant of Neville Chamberlain, and Hudson, Minister of Overseas Trade, both said that the initiative had come from the Norwegian delegate to the whaling conference. Wilson and Hudson had important communications prepared for some time, suggesting the initiative came from the British side. Wohltat by contrast had nothing much to say, and even refused to meet Chamberlain on the grounds that he did not want to commit his government officially.
Wohltat talked to Sir Horace Wilson on 18 July, and again on 21 July. He talked to Hudson for an hour on 20 July, and both these members of the British Government put to him the suggestion of a nonaggression pact of a far reaching kind between Great Britain and Germany that would remove all causes for enmity. Wilson wanted a pact of non-aggression on a grand scale. Wohltat was “receptive”. Non-intervention in mutually agreed spheres of interest and limitation of armaments were discussed.
Wilson went further. He outlined to Wohltat a possibility of Germany’s regaining the colonies she had lost after the First World War. British public opinion would not swallow an outright return to Germany of the African and Pacific colonies she had had before 1918, but a way could be found. Africa could be set up as a “condominium”, an area of joint European colonial administration, in which the Germans would naturally have a part—and, as before 1914, there was a powerful idea of handing over Portuguese colonies to Germany.
Great Britain would undertake to leave eastern and south-eastern Europe to the German sphere of influence, especially in economic matters, provided legitimate British interests were respected. Co-operation in trading could be established, with joint British and German exploitation of the large areas open to more trade —the Empire, China, perhaps also Russia. On the second occasion, Wilson also produced a paper, on 10 Downing Street notepaper, outlining these suggestions for Anglo-German co-operation. As Wohltat saw it, these proposals certainly had Chamberlain’s approval.
The British Government were casting about for ways of getting rid of their guarantee to the Poles. A non-aggression pact on these lines would “enable Britain to rid herself of her commitments vis-a-vis Poland, so the Polish problem would lose its acuteness”. Wilson added that British public opinion would react favorably to the Conservatives in an election whether they took the slogan “Readiness for war” or adopted a programme of accommodation with Germany as their programme. It was up to the Germans to choose.
With Hudson, Wohltat had another revealing conversation. After the ritual elimination of guilt for the Anglo-German conflict, and suggestions for ways of ending it—including the dispatch of R A Butler to see Hitler—Hudson also suggested a “Joint Anglo-German Declaration not to use aggression” and outlined the possibilities for Britain and Germany in economic co-operation. He agreed that eastern Europe was the “natural economic sphere of Germany” and suggested Anglo-German co-operation against third parties in China, the Empire and perhaps in Russia. Colonies were also discussed, in a way favorable to Germany. More importantly, disarmament should be started. Hudson, in his own account, saw one of the Germans’ problems as “how, when rearmament came to an end, we could find markets for the products of their heavy industries”. Wohltat said that these could be found for Germany in southeastern Europe, but, in liberalizing trade, a great problem would be the German debt, and lack of capital to tide over the difficulties. Would England and America help? Hudson answered:
From my discussions I had had with friends in America on this very question I thought we could look forward with some confidence to American help and as far as this country was concerned I had little doubt
In other words, Britain would lend Germany large sums in cash, and would drag the Americans into it, once German disarmament got going.
These conversations never led anywhere. All that the London Embassy heard was a rebuke from Ribbentrop for having allowed them to take place. The paper read to Wohltat by Wilson disappeared from the records. On the British side, Hudson, in the German Ambassador’s phrase, “driven by his feverish need to make himself important”, talked out of turn and rumors appeared in the press to the effect that the appeasers were at work, offering a £billion to the Germans. These rum ours in the News Chronicle and the Telegraph were denied by the British Government in Parliament. But Wilson, talking early in August to the German Ambassador, did not deny that a loan offer had been made and outlined again the programme he and Hudson had suggested to Wohltat.
In the circumstances, Germany conducted her policy in 1939 believing that the British regarded their own commitment to Poland as a dangerous irrelevance, and both Hitler and Ribbentrop seem to have suspected, from this and similar evidence, that the British would not seriously intervene if the German army marched into Poland.
in The Observer supplement, May 1972.
