How far did the UK aristocracy’s love of the Nazis really go?

The late historian Sir Martin Gilbert liked to tell the story of the occasion when the two warlords almost met. It was 1932 and Churchill, out of office, was visiting Germany.

He found himself in Munich and was approached by the Nazi leader’s Harvard-educated sidekick Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, who offered to arrange a meeting with Hitler.

Churchill was willing but warned Hanfstaengl that he would take up the issue of antisemitism. “Tell your boss antisemitism may be a good starter but it is a bad stayer,” he said. The meeting never took place.

A claque of reactionary dukes took longer to perceive the Führer’s true colours. The Duke of Westminster, possibly the wealthiest man in Britain in the 1930s, blamed communists and Jews for stirring up trouble between Britain and Germany. He named his dog “Jew”.

The Duke of Buccleuch, who held the honorific position of Lord Steward of the Royal Household, travelled to Germany in April 1939 to join in celebrations of Hitler’s 50th birthday.

By this time the path to war was clear and his visit embarrassed Buckingham Palace. Upon arrival in Germany he received instructions from London to refrain from attending the festivities.

Yet for the most part the British aristocracy was no more inclined to fascism than any other segment of the population. Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists had members from all classes, including proletarian racists from the East End of London.

Why, then, does the picture of an establishment in thrall to fascism die so hard? One reason was the publicity that some of the blue-blooded right-wingers attracted. Lady Astor’s “Cliveden set”, supposedly plotting appeasement between tennis and shooting parties during country house weekends, was in large measure a fantasy conjured up by the brilliant communist journalist-provocateur Claud Cockburn. But the myth endures to this day.

Then there was the tragic story of Unity Mitford, daughter of Lord Redesdale, sister-in-law of Mosley and of the Duke of Devonshire. Besotted with Hitler, Unity moved to Germany to be near her hero, who she contrived to meet 140 times.

She shot herself on the day Britain declared war against Germany. But Unity was no more typical of her class than her sister Jessica who became a communist.

There was another reason why the legend of aristocratic embrace of Nazism stuck: the Nazis themselves half believed it.

They had an absurdly exaggerated notion of the influence of the titled upper-crust in British politics.

The German Ambassador in London, Joachim von Ribbentrop, a shameless social climber, cultivated British high society and stuffed the guest lists for embassy parties with lords and ladies.

The dangerous dalliance of the Duke of Windsor, the former King Edward VIII, with the Nazis in 1940 is notorious. Less well known is the fact that his (and King George VI’s) brother, the Duke of Kent, was also viewed by the Germans as a potential sympathiser. They were mistaken: he was a loyal British citizen.

But the error was part of a more generally skewed picture that the Nazis had of the role of the aristocracy in British society and politics.

When Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, flew to Scotland in 1941 on his crazy “peace mission”, it was symptomatic that he chose to parachute to the ground south of Glasgow, hoping to reach Dungavel House, the nearby home of the 14th Duke of Hamilton. Hess had met Hamilton, the premier duke of Scotland, at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

He regarded the duke as a personal friend and a potential ally. The duke had, indeed, argued as late as 1939, in favour of Germany’s right to Lebensraum [living space]. In 1940 he had succeeded the Duke of Buccleuch as Lord Steward of the Royal Household. Hess believed that this office gave

Hamilton automatic access to the king. He hoped to persuade the duke to use this to enable him to negotiate a compromise peace between Germany and Britain. In fact, Hamilton, whatever his pre-war opinions, was a loyal supporter of the war effort and Hess, instead of being ushered into the royal presence, spent the rest of his life in jail.

The limited extent of British upper-class support for fascism stands out in an international comparison. In France, for example, the great majority of families with old aristocratic handles were sympathisers with the far-right. Strongly influenced by the anti-republicanism and antisemitism deeply embedded in the Roman Catholic Church at that period, they lent their support to organisations such as the royalist Action Française and the fascist leagues.

They bitterly opposed the left-wing Popular Front government of 1936-7, led by the Jewish socialist Léon Blum. After the fall of France in of 1940, most of them backed the collaborationist, antisemitic regime of Marshal Pétain.

In Italy the aristocracy felt little kinship with Mussolini, whom they regarded as a guttersnipe and rabble-rouser, but most of them nevertheless went along with the fascist regime with few qualms throughout the 21 years of its existence — until it no longer seemed convenient.

In assessing British attitudes in the 1930s, we have to transport ourselves back into the atmosphere of the time: the lingering aftermath of the Great Depression; British feelings of guilt at what seemed vindictive treatment of Germany after the First World War; an apparently impending world struggle between communism and fascism. Things that look plain to us today were less so at the time.

Not all the pro-Germans remained appeasers to the end and not all the appeasers were pro-German. British advocates of friendship with Germany were often antisemites. But not all. Many antisemites were friends of Germany, but some were staunch British loyalists who held, on that account, that it was important to keep Jews out of Britain. And as is the way of the world, some people changed their opinions to fit the changing circumstances of the times.

Many of the super-patriots who demanded the internment of Sir Oswald Mosley and other British fascists in 1940, called in the same breath for the round-up of German refugees in Britain, most of them Jews — the so-called “friendly enemy aliens”.

The historian Sir Arthur Bryant considered Hitler “a mystic” who had enabled Germany to “find her soul”. As late as January 1940 he published a book in which he justified the Nazis’ policies towards the Jews. He was shocked to discover that ideas that a few years earlier might have seemed commonplace now aroused indignant protest. He rapidly changed his tune and became one of the most popular chroniclers of Britain’s victory over Germany.

As for Sir Arnold Wilson, who prophesied that Hitler would become “a venerable and revered figure”, he defended Jews in conversations with German friends and expressed disgust at what he had seen in 1936 during a visit to the Dachau concentration camp.

Bernard Wasserstein is emeritus professor of history at the University of Chicago. His latest book is ‘The Ambiguity of Virtue: Gertrude van Tijn and the Fate of the Dutch Jews’ (Harvard University Press).