I was amused to discover that Rudolf von Ribbentrop, the son of Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Nazi diplomat, went to Westminster School when his father was ambassador to Great Britain in the 1930s. Ribbentrop junior, now in his late eighties, recently published a memoir detailing his time at one of England’s most prestigious public schools. When I say public I mean private, and when I say private I mean the fees are somewhere up in the stratosphere, which means that he would be in the company of boys from some of the best connected families in the land, the heart of the old establishment.
The thing is about the Nazis that, while they paraded themselves as the ‘master race’, they had a distinct inferiority complex when it came to the English upper classes. One only has to read Mein Kampf to understand just how enamoured Hitler was with the British way of doing things, particularly when it came to imperial matters. His favourite movie was The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, which he watched time and again, telling his court that it was Germany’s destiny to rule Russia in the way that the British ruled India.
So, it was quite a coup to have a Ribbentrop at Westminster, ready to pass back intelligence to the Fatherland, information on the thinking of the only people the Germans believed mattered. The problem was that neither he nor his father had a clue about English cultural attitudes or public school mores. When junior was asked if he wanted to join the school’s Officer Training Corps (OTC), one of the steady institutions of all the best schools, he passed the information back to his father, who immediately reported to Berlin that the English were preparing their public schoolboys for war, not pausing to think that, if they were, they would hardly invite the participation of a German!
On another occasion there was a debate on whether the German colonies, lost at the end of the First World War, should be returned. When the motion was carried (these things are always won or lost on debating points and skill, not on matters of principle) the information was also passed back to Germany, a sign that the British were willing to make concessions. When an MP visited the school to praise the League of Nations and criticise Hitler, junior rose to contradict him and was immediately slapped down by the master in attendance, saying that while questions were welcome speeches were not, again a fairly standard, and continuing, put down. The other boys, true to their nature and a collective sense of grievance, stood up and walked out, a gesture also misread by Hitler’s Bismarck, who interpreted this as a sign that British sympathy for German policies ran deep!
The poor old Germans; they tried so hard to understand without even getting close. Hitler as well as enjoying movies about the British also adopted what he took to be English style, reading the Tatler and insisting on full afternoon tea, drunk from the best bone china, when he was relaxing at the Berghof, his mountain retreat in Bavaria. Himmler shared his master’s enthusiasm for English manners and attitudes, placing cricket among the compulsory sports played at the SS officer’s school in Brunswick. In anticipation of victory in 1940 Walter Schellenberg, an SS intelligence expert, prepared a handbook which, amongst other things, praises public schools, particularly Eton, the best of them all, but warning his fellow officers not to put their sons names down, because it “is sold out until 1949.” Even the Nazis, as it says in the Times, had absorbed enough of the English spirit to understand that queue jumping for Britain’s best school was simply not the thing, old boy.
So, the Germans, having conquered Poland and France, anticipating conquering Britain beyond, realised that there were clear limits even to their power: they were prepared to be beaten by Eton!
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ReplyDeleteThe German leaders were indeed much impressed by British icons, so it must have come as rather a shock to them to be thrashed by vulgar Russian peasants and American farm boys. Britain's towering achievement was not winning the war against Hitler, which was far beyond the nation's capacity, but in refusing to surrender in the face of the bully's intimidation.
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ReplyDeleteMy mother was one of the last to arrive in England on the Kindertransport in 1939. She gave birth to me in 1943.
ReplyDeleteI spoke only one language, German, until I was 6, when my mother lost a day's wages to take me once, and once only, to show me the way across many busy roads to and from my first primary school.
There was a small public library along that route. Some little time later, I discovered that library, and despite my lack of English, I was given a library card that entitled me to borrow three books a day. Which I did, and which I read - daily.
To cut a long story short, I won a place at a Grammar School. I even played rugby for my school against Eton. I went on to University and graduated in Physics.
I'm retired now. I think I've given back as much, if not more, than the blessings I received.
I bless that England, that I grew up in.
And having said that - Eton boys were rubbish at rugby!
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Small wonder that homosexuality afflicts many an Englishman ,just look at the hats they wear...
ReplyDeleteThanks, Adam, for such a detailed and thoughtful contribution. It’s such an obvious thing to say but Germany, the German psyche, was deeply influenced by history, by centuries not just of division but absurdly fine degrees of division, a steady process of political and intellectual fragmentation. In England the nation, if you like, came before thought about the nation. In Germany the nation was for so long no more than thought, unanchored in any kind of reality. All the Germans had was the ‘big idea’, and when the time came to translate ideas into reality they never quite fitted. There they were, late on the European stage, haunted by feelings that they had somehow been cheated by history, that their present greatness was not the greatness that the philosophers and the dreamers had conceived. There was the British Empire, admired and resented at one and the same time; here was one of the fundamental causes of the First World War.
ReplyDeleteHitler was not an original thinker but he still had a surprisingly versatile intellect notwithstanding. When he was visited by Eden in the early 1930s, after Germany had started rearming, he was told in a schoolmasterly fashion that Britain was a respecter of treaties. Quick as a flash he replied “Surely that was not always the case. I have no recollection of Wellington saying to Blucher ‘Get off the field; your army is illegal.’” It was his view that the policy pursued by Germany prior to the war was wrong, that the naval policy had been wrong, that Britain, as he put it, was Germany’s natural ally. The Anglo-German Naval Treaty was a sign not just of his willingness to compromise but a clever way of substitution bilateral for the multilateral deals favoured by the Versailles process.
But he still misunderstood, misunderstood centuries of English political tradition, based on a rejection of a single power dominating Continental affairs. He really had the vaguest and most impractical idea of the English system of governance as well, seeing it as essentially elitist and aristocratic, old-fashioned even by the standards of the day. He also was a very poor judge of men, Ribbentrop being a classic example, a fool rightly snubbed when he was at the Court of Saint James for his folly, snubs which then impacted on German policy on the eve of the War.
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ReplyDeleteCI, thank you so much for this information. You are the first person I have come across connected with the Kindertransport. Germany’s loss was England’s gain. If you had come a few years earlier you might very well have played rugger against my grandfather, an Eton boy. :-)
ReplyDeleteAnthony, just so as not to create any confusion here I'm going to add a pic of the Eton uniform. The chaps in the hats are a boating crew!
ReplyDeleteAna, thank you for responding.
ReplyDeleteMy mother came from Vienna, and was dressed in a dirndl on her train journey. She told me she sat opposite a man who wore a swastika on his jacket. She sat there for two days, terrified, presuming he was Gestapo.
On the boat, halfway across to England, she saw the man on deck. He was looking back at the receding coastline and took the swastika off his jacket. He spat on it and threw it into the sea.
That's when she realised that he, like her, had been travelling in disguise.
CI, I can't begin to imagine her fear. It's usually assumed that Kristallnacht was the overture to the Holocaust. That's wrong: it was the terror inflicted on the Jewish community of Vienna in the wake of the Anschluss.
ReplyDeleteCanary Islander, you had me in tears. A unique, and yet, a common story - and a reminder that we must never, never, never submit to tyranny. Britain's stubborn, solitary defiance surely was its finest hour.
ReplyDeleteCalvin, yes.
ReplyDeleteCalvin, Amen to that.
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