Alternate Histories

[stevegreen]

 

Comments

[parrot_knight]

The reality of Nazi policy was not taken seriously in many circles in Britain until well into the Second World War, and in many cases was understood as the necessary excitement of popular fervour to divide and rule a disturbed population, and even looked on with envy. The accoutrements of dictatorship, such as salutes, were merely comical and the reality would have seemed a long way away in Balmoral.

[stevegreen]

Especially for a family which used the title Saxe-Coburg and Gotha until 1917.

That said, whilst the impending European storm might have seemed very distant to a highly priviliged household with no expectations of ascending to the throne, it is disingenuous for an historian to suggest no one within the British establishment was aware of Hitler's activities.

[apostle_of_eris]

I don't get it.
It seems well known that Edward was a Nazi. A 7-year old poses for pictures as she's told.
So what's the deal?

[stevegreen]

One might have thought her mother might have known better, though.

I wonder if someone inside her eldest son's camp leaked the film?

[steer]

I don't think it really is rewriting history. A lot of people then treated the Nazi party as a joke in the early and mid 30s. Even as late as 1935 children's author Richmal Crompton thought it was just a bit of a hoot to have her hero William and his gang pretend to be Nazis. (That story is not so often reprinted in modern editions). So maybe there were people in 1933 predicting that the Nazi party would start a war. There were also people in 1980 predicting that the NF would and people in 1990 predicting that the BNP would.

[stevegreen]

Now you mention it, I don't recall hearing Martin Jarvis reading that particular tale on BBC R4.

[steer]

"Next on Radio Four Martin Jarvis takes a look at the lighter side of CrystalNacht with William Brown."

(The story is "William and the Nasties" -- it's very odd, and not a little anti-semitic.)

[unwholesome_fen]

Given what Germany had been through in the preceding decades, there was no particular reason to think in 1933 that it would be any more than a passing fad. Also, whilst forming a one party state etc. looks bad to us now, the alarm bells we hear come largely from what we know, with hindsight, about the ones that came into being after the First World War. Britain itself had only become democratic in 1928, and of course it ruled over a vast empire of peoples who weren't allowed self-determination, had recently been creating spurious monarchies to impose on former Ottoman territories etc. Gandhi and other nationalists had been in and out of Indian prisons for the preceding few years. So there's little reason to think that what had happened in Germany so far in 1933 would seem particularly bad to many people here - they had not done that many things that were significantly worse than current British colonial policy, for example. A year later, after the Night of the Long Knives, (when it became apparent how murderous they were,) might be a

[stevegreen]

Yes, our record during that era isn't particularly shining. It was the British Empire, after all, which invented concentration camps.

[unwholesome_fen]

Apparently there was an earlier precedent - the Spanish in Cuba, but certainly the British made widespread use of them in the Boer War. Anyway, the notion that some people are incapable of governing themselves, but need to be ruled with an iron fist would hardly have been considered an extreme one in the early '30s - it wouldn't have been hard for people then to extend it to include some European countries. Many nazis, of course, admired the British, and in some cases tried to reinvent themselves as English Gentlemen. Hitler himself thought that Britain was a natural ally of Germany. Germany, Italy and Japan wanted to have their own empires, like the British Empire, and it would surely require some mental gymnastics for someone to argue in favour of the latter continuing, but oppose the former on principle.

[stevegreen]

I suspect Churchill was quite envious of the NSDAP's suppression of communists and trade unions.

[buzzylittleb]

Really? Yes.

Try contemporary political cartoons. It is, in retrospect, bemusing that the thing that stuck in the collective psyche was the jumped-up little twerp with the stupid hair-cut and those ludicrous rallies. On the same note, much the same was made of the First Lord of the Admiralty and his jingoistic anti-german warnings. There is a lovely Heath-Robinson I saw recently with Churchill torpedoing model boats in a boating pond. He was underwater and armed with a snorkel and a fake u-boat conning tower. History aside, it's still hilarious. There is no royal monopoly on stupidity, gullibility and apathy.