EP 08 - Trading with the Nazis

Trading with the Nazis

- Episode 08-

Britain’s Nazi Allies

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Britain's Nazi Allies

21 February 2024

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[photo] Ambulance driver volunteers for the Spanish Republicans, Barcelona, 1937

The Communist Mirage

In the 1930s, paranoia about Soviet Communism blinded the British government to Hitler's threat. In reality Communists were a tiny, powerless fringe in European politics, largely because Moscow’s international organisation, Comintern, had always banned communists from allying with socialists.

Comintern was fantastically inept. Moscow insisted that communists in every country work for peace, not least because, until the late 1930s, the Soviet Union was hopelessly unprepared for a modern war.

At one point in the late 1920s Comintern in Moscow was actually instructing German communists to work with Hitler. Later, despite the growing threat of the Third Reich, the few British, and the rather more numerous French communists found themselves being instructed to oppose rearmament in their own countries.

Moscow had nothing to do with the left-wing government elected in Spain in 1936, and was late in sending aid to the Reds the Rojos once they were at war with Franco’s fascists.

Tory Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, openly welcomed the carnage in Spain. It would, he declared, make the British public understand that Nazi Germany would be ‘an ally of ours and of all order-loving folk.’

[photo] Women snipers fighting for the elected left-wing Spanish government 1936

[photo] The Temptations of Anthony Eden - Punch Cartoon April 1935 by Leonard Raven-Hill

The Germans were actually selling weapons to the Russians in 1935

After months of invitations from Moscow with the intention of agreeing a pact to contain Hitler, the British Cabinet very reluctantly agreed that the Deputy Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, could go.

He arrived on 28 March 1935 and was astonished to find he was being met by crowds waving Union flags. Anthony Eden then found that he got on very well with Josef Stalin.

Stalin told Eden that Hitler’s speeches about encirclement and the threat from the Soviet Union were just a smokescreen to fool the British. After all, Stalin pointed out, the Germans were actually selling weapons to the Russians. So much for being afraid of a Soviet attack.

Britain, Stalin pointed out, could stop Hitler by cutting off his supply of raw materials. He was completely correct. Eden came back to London in April 1935 convinced that there had to be a positive British response.

The British Cabinet would not … even … discuss it.

#89 Britain's Nazi Allies - Ep 8 Trading with the Nazis

Thanks to the British unsubstantiated fear of communism the closing of the border with France conclusively swung the Spanish Civil War towards Franco’s fascists.

[photo] Guernica by Pablo Picasso, 1937, painted in Paris in response to Nazi bombing of the town in the Basque Country in support of Franco and his fascists

Spanish Civil War: The Great British Betrayal

In July 1936 the Spanish General Francisco Franco launched a military coup against the elected left-wing government in Madrid. By the end of the month, substantial military aid was arriving from the fascist regimes in Germany and Italy.

The German bombers that would subsequently devastate Guernica (in April 1937) may well have been carrying fuel derived from American Standard Oil and parts made by General Motors.

On 25 July 1936 the French left-wing government, Front Populaire, voted to send aid to the Spanish government. But two days later the order was countermanded – after strong pressure from London. Finally on 13 June 1938, under continued pressure from London, the French closed their border with Spain.

As historian Jonathan Haslam makes clear in his book (The Spectre of War: International Communism and the Origins of World War II) the Spanish Republicans or Rojos were now doomed.

Thanks to the British unsubstantiated fear of communism the closing of the border with France conclusively swung the Spanish Civil War towards Franco’s fascists.

The result of British policy was Franco’s victory and decade after decade of grim fascist dictatorship that, even today, the Spanish find it almost too painful to discuss.

[photo] Republican woman and child arriving on foot in French town of Perthus, February 1939

[photo] Chamberlain back from Munich, 30 September 1938: My good friends, for the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time.

1937 - the British prefer liquidation of Communism to defeat of Nazism

New Tory Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, elected in May 1937, appointed a new head of the Foreign Office. Perhaps he’d had enough of Sir Robert Vansittart’s pleas, echoing those of Anthony Eden, for an agreement with the Soviet Union to contain Hitler.

Vansittart’s replacement was another Etonian (of course) Alexander Cadogan. Chamberlain said he’d chosen him because he was ‘a sane, slow man.’

But Chamberlain, who had made it plain that he intended to conduct his own foreign policy, had probably chosen Codogan because he was easier to control than his predecessor. After all this ‘sane, slow man’ had actually confided in September 1936 that ‘I’m convinced that our so-called ‘policy’ has been a complete disaster since 1919.’ It was, of course, true.

British ‘so called policy’ had ended up financing Hitler and helping him equip the Third Reich for war.

And by 1937 it was becoming quite apparent that at least some influential elements on the British right wing were intending to back Hitler in some kind of showdown with Soviet Russia. The object, as ‘Colonel Rogers’, Britain's intelligence officer, had let slip in Paris in 1936, was the ‘liquidation’ of Communism.

#89 Britain's Nazi Allies - Ep 8 Trading with the Nazis

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