Last Lessons
Austria, Germany, and the Anschluss 1931-38. By Jiirgen Gehl. (O.U.P., 30s.)
TWENTY-FIVE years ago this month Neville Chamberlain flew to Berchtesgaden. The events and personalities of that 'low dishonest decade' have passed into history and only R. A. Butler survives to remind us of his own political tenacity. But the so-called 'Lessons of the Thirties' are still with us, and history is quoted at every turn in current affairs to bolster up some specious thesis. In America today people see South Vietnam as 'a faraway country' and hope to profit from Chamberlain's mistakes. The argument over the motives of Hitler and his opponents which has raged in the past twenty- five years has taken a long time to percolate through to those people who seek past parallels for present action.
Today no single view of Hiller's policy gains universal acceptance. Alan Bullock suggests in his foreword to Dr. Gehl's book that Hitler was merely the executor of the Grossdeutschland programme that had been an underlying theme in Central European politics for a century. Mr. Robertson, on the other hand, quotes approv- ingly von Papen's remark that 'it was on the limitless character of her aims that Germany ran aground,' and states unequivocally that any suggestion that Hitler 'tried to put into opera- tion a programme, carefully planned in advance, is quite untenable.'
Mr. Robertson's book deals at its broadest with the problem of how dictators behave. Hitler, he says, for example, 'relished diplomacy conducted outside officially recognised channels' (so also, incidentally, did Chamberlain), but he cannot determine to what extent Hitler's subse- quent attitude was influenced by the private visits to him of such men as Lord Allen of Hurtwood and Lord Lothian. He shows how military planning affected the diplomacy of Hitler, who occasionally became so tied up within the framework of military thinking that he attributed his own motives to others. Hitler himself 'came to believe that appeasement was a means to gain time for armaments,' and it is difficult, suggests Mr. Robertson, 'to disassociate suspicions of this kind from the thesis Eden propounded.' Eden was hawking round the Cabinet early in 1936 a booklet of diplomatic dispatches entitled The German Peril, in which he argued for a modus vivendi with Germany while Britain rearmed. Thus although, as Pro- fessor Medlicott points out, Chamberlain in 1938 'believed his course to be right in itself,' Hitler distrusted him, since he thought that he was still pursuing Eden's policy. It appears from this, therefore, that Chamberlain's appeasement policy never had the remotest chance of being success- ful, since it had been effectively sabotaged from the start by Eden's previous initiatives. In fact, of course, Chamberlain was not over-concerned about armaments, nor in the long run was Hitler: 'the vital questiOn, as he saw it, was not whether Germany was ready for war but whether the western democracies would fight.'
Debate over the origins of the Second War has centred round the two years immediately pre- ceding its outbreak, chiefly because this period is more adequately documented than any other. Both Mr. Robertson's and Dr. Gehl's books take us back to the early Thirties, to a time that is still shrouded in mystery rather than con- troversy. Dr. Gehl deals with the Anschluss and with Austro-German relations in the decade leading up to it. The earlier period is perhaps the more interesting in that the Anschluss itself has recently had a study devoted en- tirely to it. Austrian history in those years is a subject for tragedy, and I for one have never quite got over the shock on first reading G. E. R. Gedye's devastating contemporary account, Fallen Bastions. Dr. Gehl gives us a drier diplo- matic narrative that is no less dramatic. Under- lying the diplomatic debate is the anti-socialist motivation which is perhaps the most important single factor in the history of the Thirties. 'I am convinced,' Mussolini wrote to Dollfuss in July, 1933, 'that as soon as you . . . strike a blow at the Social Democrats in their stronghold, Vienna, and extend the purge to all centres . . . then many of those who today are active in the ranks of the Nazis will come over to the national front.' The British Government had suggested to Dollfuss that he should get on terms with his socialist opponents in order to strengthen his political position (a creditable move that smacks of Vansittart's influence), but Dollfuss preferred to find salvation through an anti-Marxist front. A move to the left would not have saved Dollfuss, but it might have saved Austria; a move to the right was suicidal for both.
Professor Medlicott's pamphlet is perhaps the final fling of the old guard, who are able to add an interesting dimension to the study of the war's origins by tempering their judgment with personal recollections. His pamphlet is a sum- mary of the thinking of an older generation before the advent of younger historians. He rehearses the old arguments about rearmament, and cites Chamberlain's belief that appeasement was more likely to succeed if it were a policy based on strength. He quotes Chamberlain as writing in March, 1938, that 'in the absence of a powerful ally, and until our armaments, are completed, we must adjust our foreign policy to our circumstances, and even bear with patience and good humour actions which we should like to treat in very different fashion.' But he fails to show why, if the rearmament situation had improved by the spring of 1939, Chamber- lain continued to follow the appeasement policy he had adopted in 1938 when he thought • that Britain was militarily weak. He does try to show why Britain and France failed to secure an alliance with Russia and from the diplomatic confusion after the German occupation of Prague he produces evidence on which to build the assumption that 'there was no desire in Paris or London to exclude Russia.' But if this was the case, why did Halifax turn down Litvinov's suggestion that there should be a conference be- tween Britain, France, Russia, Poland and Rumania, on the inadequate grounds that it would be impossible to send out a responsible Minister to such a meeting?
I always used to think not only that Hitler was the most evil man civilisation had ever per- mitted to exert power, but also that this in itself was a judgment which would last for all time. The frightening aspect of the revelations in the two books reviewed here is the way in which the portrait of Hitler emerges as that of a wholly rational man grappling with the power-political problems of his time. Were it not for the evi- dence of film archives and statistics, future generations might well have a very different attitude towards Adolf Hitler than the one which now obtains. As it is, it seems likely that A. J. P. Taylor's oft-misquoted judgment will stand: 'in principle and doctrine, Hitler was no more wicked and unscrupulous than many other con- temporary statesmen. In wicked acts he outdid them all.'
Mr. Taylor himself has re-entered the fray in his new edition of the Origins of the Second World War with a chapter of 'Second Thoughts' (Hamish Hamilton, 25s.). With humour and skill he reinforces several points made in the book, though in showing the relative unimportance of the Nazi rearmament programme he places too much value perhaps on Burton Klein's book on the subject, itself a book indebted to those 'loaded' Nuremberg documents which Mr. Taylor has taught us to distrust. He also demolishes the Hossbach memorandum, one hopes for ever, by subjecting it to some detailed textual criticism; no mediaeval historian, one is left with the thought, would have looked at it twice. Clearing up these details Mr. Taylor is at his most lucid, and then suddenly in the last three pages he descends into a welter of nonsense about appease- ment. Appeasement was popular, he announces. Granted; but not so popular that Chamberlain did not have to carry out his pro-German policy in a cloak-and-dagger atmosphere, bypassing Parliament, the Foreign Office, even the Cabinet, and muzzling the press. Mr. Taylor, as he stumped the country in the 1930s denouncing 'the appeasers' from political platforms, may have believed rumours or guessed the truth, but he could not have known it for certain. Today we have the truth. We have evidence of the mis- guided and undemocratic manner in which Chamberlain and his friends conducted their foreign policy. Perhaps all governments are mis- guided and undemocratic, but this is no reason to make apologies for appeasement. RICHARD GOTT
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