In other words, an ultranationalist, outwardly aggressive totalitarian state was tolerable in Italy because it was not Germany. Not only was Germany a powerful economic force, but the country was situated at the heart of the continent. Any attempt to extend its borders westwards would provoke another war, and, while eastern expansion was much less of a concern now that Russia was no longer a British ally, an enlarged Germany might still be a threat to continental peace and to British interests.
Another ultranationalist right-wing party had emerged in Bavaria during Germany’s economic depression in the early Twenties. The National Socialist German Workers’ Party offered an antidote to burgeoning German communism. According to the party leaders, Germany had been denied her ‘rightful’ position as the greatest European power by the ‘Marxist’ politicians who had ‘stabbed’ the country ‘in the back’ by surrendering in 1918, and by the ‘vindictive’ Allies at Versailles. The National Socialists were led by Adolf Hitler, a war veteran who earned a reputation as ‘Germany’s Mussolini’ for his mesmerizing rhetoric and eagerness to use paramilitary violence against his opponents. Yet while Hitler’s party attracted strong support among the Bavarian middle class and the landholding peasantry, it failed to secure the blessing of the Bavarian army. When it attempted a coup in 1923, it was easily quashed and its leaders were imprisoned. In jail Hitler composed his rambling semi-literate autobiography, Mein Kampf, in which he vilified the Jewish race as a ‘poison’ that had adulterated the ‘pure’ Germanic race. He also identified ‘Russia and her vassal border states’ as the territory into which Germany must expand in order to gain essential ‘living space’. After his release from prison, Hitler renamed his party the ‘Nazis’, but they made little electoral headway, claiming only twelve seats and a mere 2.6 per cent of the vote in 1928.
When the financial crash came in 1929, everything changed. In severe economic depression, the appeal of the Nazis increased exponentially. It was stimulated by the widespread support for the Communist party, which organized strikes and protests throughout the country. The German economy appeared to be on the point of collapsing – production fell by 40 per cent, while unemployment rose to 30 per cent. Hitler blamed the crisis on the usual suspects – the Jews who ‘controlled world finance’ and the politicians who had drafted the ‘punitive’ Versailles Treaty. At the 1930 election the Nazis and the communists gained around a third of the popular vote between them; two years later they claimed over half, with the Nazis emerging as the largest single party.
It was difficult to see how the country could be governed without the consent of either the Nazis or the communists, and it was clear which party Germany’s leaders would favour. President Hindenburg appointed Hitler as chancellor of the German Reich, in the belief that his presidential power could control the inexperienced and ‘vulgar’ Bavarian demagogue. The industrialists and the wealthier classes saw Hitler as a puppet, and preferred any alternative to communism. Yet once in power, Hitler proved to be as ruthless as Mussolini, arresting and killing political opponents, abolishing the unions and the free press, and establishing a one-party totalitarian state. His corporatist approach to economics echoed the Duce’s, as did his emphasis on internal ‘order’ and ‘discipline’. His obsession with German racial purity and persecution of Jews went beyond Italian Fascist anti-Semitism. Hitler was also more emphatic than Mussolini in his criticisms of the Versailles Treaty, demanding that its clauses should be revoked immediately and that Germany should be permitted to rearm.
Hitler’s rise to power did not arouse great concern within the Tory party or England’s right-wing press. Most Conservatives saw the Nazis as preferable to the communists, and many sympathized with Hitler’s grievances. Newspapers such as the Daily Mail praised the new German leader as the ‘saviour’ of his nation and even applauded his anti-Semitism. Hitler’s features soon became as familiar to the British public as those of a native politician. Churchill was virtually alone on the government benches, in the months after January 1933, in describing Nazism as a threat to the British Empire.
26
The bigger picture
The rise of Nazism caused the first significant division between the Tories and Labour over foreign policy since the war. In contrast to the Conservatives, Labour MPs vociferously opposed the Nazis from the outset, on ideological grounds. The party did not advocate rearmament as a means of preparing for a struggle with Fascism, but continued to promote multilateral disarmament. Labour had no faith in the failed diplomatic and military strategies of the pre-1914 era; instead they believed that the collective resolution of disputes through the League of Nations, coupled with disarmament, was the only way of confronting the Fascist dictators and guaranteeing a lasting peace.
Conservative MPs were equally enthusiastic about the League, though for more pragmatic reasons. They hoped the organization might maintain continental peace so that Britain could avoid an expensive and unpopular rearmament programme, and concentrate instead upon her pressing domestic and imperial concerns. The League inspired zeal among the population in the early Thirties. To a generation which believed that the senseless carnage of the recent war had been caused, in large part, by a lack of foresight and judgement among the major powers, the attraction of a supranational organization was obvious. It would, they believed, resolve all disputes, at minimal risk to its members.
The English saw the League as the answer to potential diplomatic problems, yet its existence begged many questions. How could the organization’s authority be backed up by force, in the absence of an army or of rearmament of its most powerful members? The League’s supporters appeared to believe that its moral authority made rearmament unnecessary: the mere threat of economic sanctions would, they thought, force an aggressor to back down. But while this may have sounded convincing in theory, it had yet to be proven in practice. Another potential flaw was the question of how the League could settle disputes impartially in cases where the interests of larger and smaller members clashed. In principle all members of the League were equal, but in reality states such as Luxembourg and Lithuania yielded far less influence with the organization than France, Italy, Japan or Britain. It augured ill that powerful nations such as Britain simply ignored the League whenever it was convenient for them to do so; they never, for example, referred disputes within the empire to the League for arbitration.
In 1931 Japan invaded Manchuria, officially a Chinese territory but in practice an autonomous province. In the months before the invasion, Manchuria had descended into a state of social and economic anarchy, and the Japanese took control in order to protect the numerous commercial interests they possessed there. Sympathetic to Japan’s point of view, the Tory-dominated National Government ensured the League did not condemn the country as an aggressor or invoke sanctions against her. Instead the British conducted an inquiry into the conquest and found that many Japanese grievances were justified, though they had acted unlawfully. It was a classic diplomatic fudge designed to reconcile China to the loss of territory and justify a reprimand to Japan on the international stage, yet it satisfied neither party. China felt let down by the League, while Japan withdrew from it in protest.
The Manchurian incident demonstrated the limitations of collective security. The League failed to arrive at a satisfactory settlement because Britain and France were unwilling to confront Japan, a powerful League member like themselves, with sanctions or the threat of force. At the same time, the episode reinforced fears among Conservatives concerning Britain’s commitment to collective security; might its membership of the League embroil the country in a disastrous war over an affair that was of little significance to its people or its imperial interests?