A NAZI SYMPATHISER AND SUPREME TOADY

Sir Arthur Bryant's reputation as the 'Grand Old Man of British historical writing' should be reassessed, says Andrew Roberts

ON 19 February 1979, London's literary, political and historical world came togeth- er in the Vintners' Hall for a dinner to pay tribute to Sir Arthur Bryant CH, CBE, LLD, FRHist.S, FRSL on his 80th birth- day. The author of over 40 books, a colum- nist on the Illustrated London News for more than four decades, knighted by Churchill, Bryant sat between Harold Macmillan and the Archbishop of Canter- bury. Other guests included the then Prime Minister, James Callaghan, a brace of field marshals, the chairman of Times Newspapers and 27 peers and peeresses. It was, as one of those present has put it, 'Bryant's apotheosis as the Grand Old Man of British historical writing'.

Shortly after the 1945 general election, Clement Attlee asked Churchill to name his favourite living historian. Churchill answered that it was Arthur Bryant, which struck Attlee as a coincidence because Bryant was his favourite too. Bryant's best- selling histories of the Napoleonic wars had been the literary counterparts to those wartime Churchillian speeches which had urged the British people to emulate the great heroes of their past. Yet Churchill, Attlee and the distin- guished guests in the Vintners' Hall could not have known what the expiry of the Fifty-Year Rule and the recent opening of Bryant's private archive can now tell us: that far from being the patriot he so long and loudly proclaimed himself, Arthur Bryant was, in fact, a Nazi sympathiser and fascist fellow-traveller, who only narrowly escaped internment as a potential traitor in 1940. He was also, incidentally, a supreme toady, fraudulent scholar and humbug. Born in 1899, Bryant grew up at Wind- sor, the son of a court official. At 18, he joined the Royal Flying Corps and spent the last 18 months of the Great War serv- ing in France. In November 1918, his atti- tude towards the Germans changed from intense dislike to an equally irrational `rad- ical compassion, even moral envy, for Ger- many'. After a spell in teaching in the 1920s, Bryant began to construct a political phi- losophy which constantly harked back to a Golden Age in which England had basked in peace and prosperity, where there was no discontent or civil unrest, and happy ruddy-cheeked yokels tilled the fields, whistling. It formed the basis of his attacks on anyone — capitalists, Jews, liberals, socialists — who he felt disturbed this idyll.

In 1934, he published a collection of essays on world statesmen entitled The Man and The Hour: Studies of Six Great Men of Our Time. In a year which saw the Night of the Long Knives, Bryant wrote that `Hitler, like all the best Germans, is a mystic', and eulogised `the mystic dream of inspired leadership and disciplined unity' in Germany: 'In awakening her, Hitler has shown himself to be a great German.' He likened Hitler's `vital and passionate quality' of sincerity to that of Cromwell, an analogy he was often to return to in later years. Writing of Mus- solini's `magnificent achievement' and Germany's new `prophets and heroes', Bryant said he believed Germany was 'happy and self-sufficient in her own somewhat mystic conception of life and government'. Bryant used his weekly Illustrated Lon- don News column, `Our Notebook', which he had taken over from G.K. Chesterton in 1936, to apologise for jackbooted atroc- ities. In the wake of the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938, he admitted it was `a sorry business', but went on to blame the organised anti-Semitic outrages on the Jews themselves, saying that the Germans were 'virile, manly and heroic'.

'It's Twenty Questions with MPs.' All Bryant could find to criticise them for was 'a curious inability to see things from other people's point of view'. He explained how ten years earlier the Jews had `lorded it' over the Germans, and were now getting no more than what had been coming to them. In January 1939, he selected Mein Kampf as the book of the month for the National Book Association, a right-wing book club of which he was general editor. Nicknamed the `Nazi Book Association', this distributed works chosen by Bryant, often by authors who were fully paid-up, card-carrying fascists.

The details of Bryant's secret visit to Germany in July 1939 only became avail- able in January 1990 because an official in Harold Wilson's Downing Street had decided in 1968 that their release under the Thirty-Year Rule would embarrass the his- torian. Only the year before, Harold Wil- son had raised Bryant to the Companionship of Honour. The news that Bryant had visited Nazi Germany immedi- ately before the war and described Hitler as 'the great German whom fate has raised up to rescue his people' might well have affected the sales of the patriotic books he was publishing in the Sixties and Seventies. The papers were therefore reclassified under the rarely used Fifty-Year Rule.

The man Bryant met, with Chamberlain's foreknowledge and approval, was Walther Hewel, Hitler's adjutant. He could not have chosen a more fanatical Nazi. Hewel had gone to prison with Hitler in the Twen- ties and was to die with him in the Fiihrerbunker in the last days of the war. As might have been expected, Bryant's visit did nothing to help convince Hitler of the inevitable consequences of attacking Poland, but his statement that the Ger- mans should not attach too much impor- tance to the tone of the British press was later quoted approvingly by Hitler, who believed that the British Government regretted the Polish guarantee and was preparing for a second Munich. By not vig- orously and repeatedly insisting that the opposite was the case, Bryant did his coun- try a grave disservice.

Just as one might have imagined a period of silence on his part would have been wel- come, Bryant flung himself into the anti- war movement. As earlier with the Jews and Czechs, he began to blame the Poles for provoking the Fiihrer, arguing that there was no enthusiasm `for the cause of the Polish leaders' outside Westminster, Fleet Street, `the sheltered West End' and `the more prosperous suburbs'. 'Our real quarrel,' he wrote, `is not with fascism.'

In the last month of the Phoney War, April 1940, Bryant published Unfinished Victory, which was as complete an apologia for Nazism as it is possible to imagine being published at such a time. The book lamented that Hitler's speeches offering Anglo-German co-operation had fallen `on rather deaf ears'. This the author put down to the fact that the British Labour move- ment was so antagonised by the persecu- tion of German trade unionists that it 'overlooked the revolutionising reforms that the National Socialist Party was achieving for German labour'. According to Bryant, 'under Hitler's forceful leader- ship' Germany was regaining 'a just confi- dence' in herself. He regretted that during the Anschluss the British public had failed to witness the cheering Austrian crowds. He waxed lyrical over his July 1939 visit to Germany, where he had met children, 'their faces gleaming with happiness and health and new-found knowledge of how to live'. Leni Riefenstahl could not have presented Nazi Germany in a warmer light.

The Jews, he wrote, had taken advan- tage, of Germany's postwar weakness and 'since the sun does not shine often on their race, they made hay as fast as they could'. In this British equivalent of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Bryant argued that Jewish control of German wealth and power 'soon lost all relation to their num- bers'. All government ministries had their quotas of Jews. The Reichsbank and the large private banks were 'practically con- trolled' by them. So were the press, the arts and the publishing trade. According to Bryant, 'a telephone conversation between three Jews in ministerial offices' could close down any newspaper in Germany, and this power was 'frequently used'. Fur- thermore, authorship in Germany 'almost seemed to have become a kind of Hebrew monopoly'.

As this Jewish stranglehold over Ger- man national life developed, Gentiles were excluded from privileged occupations. Bryant argued that 'at this time it was not the Aryans who exercise racial discrimina- tion'. The Germans had somehow to res- cue their superior indigenous culture from an alien hand. Bryant believed Jews exhib- ited an 'oriental and passionate enjoyment of the sensuous delight of the hour', they felt nothing but contempt for 'authority and the household gods of more pampered races . . . Their inherited instinct was to skim the cream rather than to waste vain time and effort in making enduring things,' he continued. Jews were 'lovers of the flamboyant and the arts of advertisement'. They sneered at the Teutonic virtues of discipline, hard work, thoroughness and craftsmanship. Still claiming a historian's objectivity, Bryant then wrote of 'the migrant type — "Asiatic hoards on the sands of the Mark of Brandenburg" ' who seemed 'with all the invincible vitality and irresponsible opportunism of their race to be making of a broken nation their wash- pot'.

Of the German Jews in particular, prob- ably the most cultivated and assimilated in Europe, Bryant wrote: 'They were arro- gant, they were vulgar, and they were vicious.' They made films glorifying 'finan- cial crooks, criminals and prostitutes'. Bryant reported that Jews dominated 'the innumerable nightspots and vice resorts which mocked the squalid poverty of the German capital'. Innocent Christian Ger- mans were introduced to 'a bewildering degree of sexual promiscuity . . . At pri- vate parties mattresses were strewn about and petting was only the beginning.' This took place in literally hundreds of 'cabarets, pleasure resorts and the like . . . most of them owned and managed by Jews'. Every perversion, according to Bryant, was 'exploited and stimulated by Jewish caterers who, while seldom sharing such tastes, did not hesitate to turn them to their profit'. In these chapters, Bryant drew a picture of German life between the wars from which his readers were encour- aged to sympathise with the Nazis and merely shrug when, at the end of this vicious tirade, he explained that in redress- ing the balance against the Jews it was an unfortunate German characteristic `to carry things to extremes'.

When Bryant sent the manuscript for Unfinished Victory to his publishers, Macmillans, one of the editors there, Rache Lovat Dickson, told Harold Macmillan it could not be published because it clearly condoned Nazism. Macmillan stoically answered, 'We are publishers, not policemen,' and went ahead. He resolved never to publish Bryant again. It was not long before Bryant's views were to interest policemen as well as publishers. On 23 May 1940, fas- cists began to be rounded up Sand a num- ber of Bryant's friends and correspondents appeared on Special Branch lists. Bryant quickly appreciated the seriousness of his mistake and embarked on a buying spree of Unfinished Victory, which, as a result, is now a collector's item.

It was then that Lovat Dickson approached the Oxford historian and intelligence officer, Hugh Trevor-Roper (now Lord Dacre), in a semi-official capacity to ask whether he thought Bryant should be interned as a fascist sympathiser under Regulation 18B. Trevor-Roper's advice was that it would not be necessary to arrest Bryant, as he would doubtless 'change with the times'.

He could not have been more right. By the end of 1940, Bryant had brought out a popular history of England from 1340 to 1940, entitled English Saga, which became an immediate bestseller. It fed the public's need to see Britain's plight in a broader historical context. The book more than made up in patriotism what it lacked in his- torical rigour and helped raise morale dur- ing Britain's annus mirabilis. It also kept Bryant out of Brixton prison. He described England as 'an island fortress . . . fighting a war of redemption, not only for Europe, but for her own soul'. As his friend A.L. Rowse put it, 'Arthur went on playing the gramophone records about how wonderful the English people are . . . He got rapidly on the bandwagon with English Saga, try- ing to make it up to Churchill.' Patriotism proved the ideal last refuge for Sir Arthur Bryant.

Andrew Roberts's book, Eminent Churchillians, is published by Weidenfeld this week, price £20.00.