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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Tim Bouverie
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October 10 - October 16, 2020
On April 1, 1933, the first nationwide act of persecution took place when the Nazis enacted a boycott of Jewish shops and businesses.
In a masterly 5,000-word dispatch, written in April 1933—just three months after Hitler’s accession to power—Rumbold laid bare Hitler’s social Darwinism: He starts with the assertions that man is a fighting animal; therefore the nation is, he concludes, a fighting unit, being a community of fighters. Any living organism which ceases to fight for existence is, he asserts, doomed to extinction. A country or a race which ceases to fight is equally doomed. The fighting capacity of a race depends on its purity. Hence the necessity for ridding it of foreign impurities. The Jewish race, owing to its
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Like Rome 1,500 years earlier, the British Empire was overextended and by the mid-1930s in existential danger.
The sense that the Allies were to blame for the Nazis was critical to the mentality from which appeasement developed.
Against the malevolent force of communism stood fascism. Fascism had “saved” Italy from the Bolsheviks in 1922, while the more aggressive Teutonic strain was widely credited with the same feat in Germany. In both doctrines, though particularly the latter, there were aspects which the British elite found offensive. Yet when faced with the choice, in the “Age of Extremes,” fascism appeared the lesser evil and was, indeed, considered a barrier against the communist tide.
April 1933 students at St. Andrews University endorsed the motion “This House approves of the Nazi Party, and congratulates it on its splendid work in the reformation of Germany.”40
In February 1935, no less a person than Mussolini confronted the British Ambassador to Rome over the gulf between the Nazi reality and British comprehension. “Was it possible,” the Duce asked, that there could ever exist a “Legion of Death” in England such as that which “now existed in Germany, which was devoted to killing people dangerous to the regime?”57 Coming from the murderer of Matteotti*2 this was pretty rich, but the Italian dictator had a point. The evils of the regime were plain to see, and yet many within the British elite chose to embrace Nazi Germany on account of its
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The fact was that British anti-Semitism, though shocking and offensive today, was broadly social and snobbish, rather than racial and extremist—a clear contrast with Nazism.
The Government simply cannot make up their mind, or they cannot get the Prime Minister to make up his mind. So they go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent. So we go on preparing more months and years—precious, perhaps vital to the greatness of Britain—for the locusts to eat.23
have rather come to the conclusion that the average Englishman—whilst full of common-sense as regards internal affairs—is often muddle-headed, sloppy and gullible when he considers foreign affairs. —SIR HORACE RUMBOLD TO GEOFFREY DAWSON, JUNE 10, 1936
Indeed, as the Oxford don and Labour candidate A. L. Rowse later noted, “not one of the Left intellectuals could republish what they wrote in the Thirties without revealing what idiotic judgments they made about events.”
Warsaw surrendered on September 28, 1939, after ten days of continual bombing had transformed the city “into a living inferno.”8 Seventy thousand Polish soldiers had been killed fighting the Germans; 133,000 had been wounded, and 700,000 taken prisoner. Countless civilians had died from the bombing, while thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, were murdered by the SS as well as by the Wehrmacht. In the east, the Soviets reported 50,000 Polish fatalities but no wounded—a statistic implying mass executions such as those which occurred near the Katyn Forest between March and May 1940.9 Over the
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