others of the inner circle, resulted, among other things, in an excessively polite crossing
of swords by Cecil and Lothian in the House of Lords on 16 March 1938.
During the period in which Halifax acted as a brake on Eden, he held the sinecure
Cabinet posts of Lord Privy Seal and Lord President of the Council (1935-1938). He had
been added to the Cabinet, after his return from India in 1931, as President of the Board
of Education, but devoted most of his time from 1931 to 1935 in helping Simon and
Hoare put through the Government of India Act of 1935. In October 1933, the same
group of Conservative members of Convocation who had made Lord Milner Chancellor
of Oxford University in 1925 selected Lord Irwin (Halifax), for the same position, in
succession to the late Lord Grey of Fallodon. He spent almost the whole month of June
1934 in the active functions of this position, especially in drawing up the list of recipients
of honorary degrees. This list is very significant. Among sixteen recipients of the
Doctorate of Civil Law, we find the following five names: Samuel Hoare, Maurice
Hankey, W. G. S. Adams, John Buchan, and Geoffrey Dawson.
We have indicated that Halifax's influence on foreign policy was increasingly
important in the years 1934-1937. It was he who defended Hoare in the House of Lords
in December 1935, saying: "I have never been one of those . . . who have thought that it
was any part in this dispute of the League to try to stop a war in Africa by starting a war
in Europe. It was Halifax who went with Eden to Paris in March 1936 to the discussions
of the Locarno Powers regarding the remilitarization of the Rhineland. That his task at
this meeting was to act as a brake on Eden's relatively large respect for the sanctity of
international obligations is admitted by Lord Halifax’s authorized biographer. It was
Halifax, as we have seen, who inaugurated the nonintervention policy in Spain in August
193fi. And it was Halifax who opened the third and last stage of appeasement in
November 1937 by his visit to Hitler in Berchtesgaden.
It is probable that the groundwork for Halifax's visit to Hitler had been laid by the
earlier visits of Lords Lothian and Londonderry to the same host, but our knowledge of
these earlier events is too scanty to be certain. Of Halifax's visit, the story is now clear, as
a result of the publication of the German Foreign Office memorandum on the subject and
Keith Feiling's publication of some of the letters from Neville Chamberlain to his sister.
The visit was arranged by Halifax himself, early in November 1937, at a time when he
was Acting Foreign Secretary, Eden being absent in Brussels at a meeting of signers of
the Nine-Power Pacific Treaty of 1922. As a result, Halifax had a long conversation with
Hitler on 19 November 1937 in which, whatever may have been Halifax's intention,
Hitler's government became convinced of three things: (a) that Britain regarded Germany
as the chief bulwark against communism in Europe; (b) that Britain was prepared to join
a Four Power agreement of France, Germany, Italy, and herself; and (c) that Britain was
prepared to allow Germany to liquidate Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland if this could
be done without provoking a war into which the British Government, however
unwillingly, would be dragged in opposition to Germany. The German Foreign Ministry
memorandum on this conversation makes it perfectly clear that the Germans did not
misunderstand Halifax except, possibly, on the last point. There they failed to see that if
Germany made war, the British Government would be forced into the war against
Germany by public opinion in England. The German diplomatic agents in London,
especially the Ambassador, Dirksen, saw this clearly, but the Government in Berlin
listened only to the blind and conceited ignorance of Ribbentrop. As dictators themselves,
unfamiliar with the British social or constitutional systems, the German rulers assumed
that the willingness of the British Government to accept the liquidation of Austria,
Czechoslovakia, and Poland implied that the British Government would never go to war
to prevent this liquidation. They did not see that the British Government might have to
declare war to stay in office if public opinion in Britain were sufficiently aroused. The
British Government saw this difficulty and as a last resort were prepared to declare war
but not to wage war on Germany. This distinction was not clear to the Germans and was
not accepted by the inner core of the Milner Group. It was, however, accepted by the
other elements in the government, like Chamberlain himself, and by much of the second
circle of the Milner Group, including Simon, Hoare, and probably Halifax. It was this
which resulted in the' phony war" from September 1939 to April 1940.
The memorandum on Halifax's interview, quoting the Englishman in the third person,
says in part:(10)
“In spite of these difficulties [British public opinion, the English Church, and the
Labour Party] he and other members of the British Government were fully aware that the
Führer had not only achieved a great deal inside Germany herself, but that, by destroying
Communism in his country, he had barred its road to Western Europe, and that Germany
therefore could rightly be regarded as a bulwark of the West against Bolshevism. . . .
After the ground had been prepared by an Anglo-German understanding, the four Great
West-European Powers must jointly lay the foundation for lasting peace in Europe.
Under no conditions should any of the four Powers remain outside this cooperation, or
else there would be no end to the present unstable situation.... Britons were realists and
were perhaps more than others convinced that the errors of the Versailles dictate must be
rectified. Britain always exercised her influence in this realistic sense in the past. He
pointed to Britain's role with regard to the evacuation of the Rhineland ahead of the fixed
time, the settlement of the reparations problem, and the reoccupation of the Rhineland....
He therefore wanted to know the Fuhrer's attitude toward the League of Nations, as well
as toward disarmament. All other questions could be characterized as relating to changes
in the European order, changes that sooner or later would probably take place. To these
questions belonged Danzig, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. England was only interested
that any alterations should be effected by peaceful evolution, so as to avoid methods
which might cause far-reaching disturbances, which were not desired either by the Fuhrer
or by other countries.... Only one country, Soviet Russia, stood to gain from a general
conflict. All others were at heart in favour of the consolidation of peace.”
That this attitude was not Halifax's personal argument but the point of view of the
government (and of the Milner Croup) is perfectly clear. On arrival, Halifax assured the
Germans that the purposes of his visit had been discussed and accepted by the Foreign
Secretary (Eden) and the Prime Minister. On 26 November 1937, one week after
Halifax's conversation with Hitler, Chamberlain wrote to his sister that he hoped to
satisfy German colonial demands by giving them the Belgian Congo and Angola in place
of Tanganyika. He then added: "I don't see why we shouldn't say to Germany, 'Give us
satisfactory assurances that you won't use force to deal with the Austrians and
Czechoslovakians, and we will give you similar assurances that we won't use force to
prevent the changes you want if you can get them by peaceful means.'" (11)
It might be noted that when John W. Wheeler-Bennett, of Chatham House and the