Charles Spicer - Coffee With Hitler: The Untold Story of the Amateur Spies Who Tried to Civilize the Nazis

Coffee With Hitler

The Story of the Amateur Spies Who Tried to Civilize the Nazis

Charles Spicer

COFFEE WITH HITLER

Pegasus Books, Ltd.

148 West 37th Street, 13th Floor

New York, NY 10018

Copyright 2022 by Charles Spicer

First Pegasus Books cloth edition September 2022

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-63936-226-4

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63936-226-4

Jacket design by Faceout Studio, Lindy Kasler

Imagery by Getty Images & Shutterstock

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

www.pegasusbooks.com

For my parents, Julian (19342019), who taught me to read, and Sarah (19401999), who challenged me to think.

C OFFEE WITH H ITLER TELLS THE story, for the first time, of a handful of amateur British intelligence agents who wined, dined and charmed the leading National Socialists in Germany in the 1930s. They hoped to avert a second war in Europe by building rapport with the Third Reich politically, economically and socially. In parallel, they gathered intelligence on this startlingly vulgar and maverick new regime which they used to educate the aloof British government. By exploiting German admiration for British culture, they hoped to entice Germany back into the fold of civilised European nations and to welcome her alarmingly ambitious leader Adolf Hitler into the pantheon of respectable international statesmen. In short, they wanted to civilise the Nazis.

The vehicle for this unusual mix of amateur diplomacy and intelligence gathering was the then and still controversial Anglo-German Fellowship. Funded by leading industrialists and the City of London, anxious to nurture business with Germany, this exclusive friendship society recruited (to a degree never fully acknowledged) distinguished supporters from both English and German royalty, the British aristocracy, the three fighting forces, and politicians from all parties and both Houses of Parliament. Set up two years after Hitler came to power, the new Fellowship followed in the wake of highly cultured predecessor societies dating back to the nineteenth century and sat comfortably in the traditional cousinhood and mutual admiration of the English and the Germans.

The protagonists were a left-wing, pacifist Welsh political secretary, a conservative, butterfly-collecting Old Etonian businessman and a pioneering Great War fighter ace. Each was fluent in German and expert on the countrys politics and economy, but otherwise they made unlikely colleagues. Between them, they befriended Adolf Hitlers most Anglophile and socially aspirational paladins: Joachim Ribbentrop, the champagne salesman who rose to become foreign minister; Hermann Gring, president of the Reichstag, commander of the Luftwaffe, art collector and field sports enthusiast; and Rudolf Hess, scribe for Hitlers Mein Kampf and his internationalist deputy fhrer. Though only minor players in the terrible drama of Europes descent into total war, the three Britons operated at the heart of the British Establishment. They infiltrated the Nazi high command deeper than any of their countrymen to pass back better intelligence to both their government and its domestic critics. Straddling this porous border between hard and soft diplomacy, their exploits fuelled tensions between the amateurs and the professionals.

The tasteful settings for their efforts ranged from tea parties in Downing Street, banquets at Londons best hotels and the coronation of George VI to coffee and cakes at Hitlers Bavarian mountain home, champagne galas at the Berlin Olympics and elegant afternoon receptions at the Nuremberg rallies. More private encounters between the elites of both countries were nurtured at shooting weekends at English stately homes, whisky drinking sessions at German estates, discreet meetings in London flats and whispered exchanges in the corridors of embassies and foreign ministries.

These unlikely heroes witnessed at first hand key landmarks in the seemingly unstoppable rise of the Third Reich: dinner with Heinrich Himmler before the Night of the Long Knives; white tie celebrations for the anniversary of Hitlers release from prison; alerting Whitehall to the remilitarisation of the Rhineland; riding in the Fhrers cavalcade at the Nuremberg rally; escorting David Lloyd George to meet the German leader; inviting their host to visit London; warning the British foreign secretary of the invasion of Czechoslovakia; walking through Kensington Gardens with the conspirators plotting to overthrow Hitler; greeting Neville Chamberlain on his return from Munich; briefing Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden on the eve of war; and then negotiating between the British government and the German resistance once war was declared. Drawing on newly discovered primary sources, their story also sheds light on Winston Churchills approach to appeasement, the USs entry into the war, the early career of the infamous Soviet spy, Kim Philby, and the quixotic peace mission of the deputy fhrer Rudolf Hess to an aristocrats estate in Scotland.

Their hands-on engagement with this brutal and apparently uncultured new Germany was in sharp contrast with the head-in-the-sand attitude taken by the British coalition governments led by Ramsay MacDonald and Stanley Baldwin. Guided by a patrician and Francophile Foreign Office, Downing Street preferred to ignore the perturbing rise of National Socialism and cold shoulder its democratically elected government in the hope it would fade away like a bad smell.

This is not another book about appeasement. By consciously taking civilising rather than appeasing as its central theme, it seeks to move beyond the often-fevered debate around appeasement that has rumbled on for eight decades. Though a respectable diplomatic strategy prior to 1938, it is now so polarising a term as to risk alienating all but the most specialised of history readers. While respected scholars continue to paint Neville Chamberlains appeasement of Hitlers Germany in a more sympathetic light, the Guilty Men interpretation of the build-up to the Second World War has captured the public imagination. (Winston Churchill has been the subject of around one thousand biographies while those about his immediate predecessor can be counted on one hand.) More dangerously, post-war politicians have weaponised the term appeasement to justify military incursions from Suez and Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan and used it as a brickbat to condemn recent diplomatic compromises such as the ceasefire between the Turks and the Kurds and the Western democracies dealings with President Putins Russia and President Xis China.

Appeasement, in the sense of one nation making concessions to the demands of another to prevent an escalation of hostilities, is essentially reactive and passive. The civilising mission of the leaders of the Anglo-German Fellowship to charm, cultivate and connect with the new regime was proactive and dynamic. This path was smoothed by both the National Socialists ideological veneration of Britain and her Empire (expertly observed by Gerwin Strobl in