The Hitler Essays:

“The Truth About Hitler,” The Strand Magazine, November 1935, Cohen C481.
“Hitler and His Choice,” Great Contemporaries (London and New York, 1937), Cohen A105.
“This Age of Government by Great Dictators,” News of the World, 10 October 1937, Cohen C535.7.

“Did Churchill ever admire Hitler?”

The question, perplexing on its face, is nevertheless sometimes asked. Critics have long quoted selectively from Churchill to show he was “for Hitler before he was against him.”

For Bavarian politician Franz Joseph Strauss, the proof was Churchill’s writing: “We may yet live to see Hitler a gentler figure in a happier age.”

Historian Robert Rhodes James said Churchill “sympathetically” described Hitler’s “long, wearying battle for the German heart.” In fact Churchill’s word was “wearing” not “wearying,” which was rather less sympathetic.

The subject of those essays didn’t think Churchill was sympathetic at all. After reading “The Truth About Hitler” in 1935, an infuriated Führer instructed his ambassador in London “to lodge a strong protest against ‘the personal attack on the head of the German state.’”

Hitler as “Great Contemporary”

“The Truth About Hitler,” first of the Hitler essays, appeared in late 1935. Deciding to republish it in his 1937 book Great Contemporaries, Churchill courteously submitted his text to Sir Robert Vansittart, Permanent Undersecretary at the Foreign Office. This was a careful choice, since Vansittart had been somewhat supportive of Churchill’s demands for rearmament.

But Vansittart was on holiday, so Churchill’s draft was read by Clifford Norton, who recommended it not appear at all:

[I]t is hardly to be thought that this article would be at all palatable to the powers that be in Germany. In the present rather delicate state of our relations with that country, when one does not know which way the cat will jump, it might therefore be questioned whether republication just now was advisable.

Churchill agreed to certain deletions which would “take the sting out of the article,” but said he “would cut out nothing” that he wouldn’t say “on public platforms.” This did not prevent him from restoring some of his deletions in another newspaper article. (Read on.)

It has been questioned why Churchill made room in his book for Hitler. Was he more optimistic than he should have been about the Führer?  Perhaps—or as Martin Gilbert often quipped, “perhaps not.” Hitler was a popular subject for writers in the mid-1930s. Germany’s rearmament and intentions were mounting concerns. Yet, like all three of his Hitler essays, Churchill had little to say that was positive.

Churchill’s textual changes

What part of his 1935 article did Churchill alter in Great Contemporaries? What did the Foreign Office persuade him to “soften”? Bibliogarapher Ronald Cohen came to my aid with a line-by-line digital comparison of the “The Truth About Hitler” and the Great Contemporaries chapter. A Word document containing the 1935 text, showing 1937 deletions in strike-throughs and highlights, is available to readers via email.

This exercise was worth the trouble because it answered many questions. It shows that Churchill barely changed his sentiments between 1935 and 1937. His deletions mainly involve events well known in 1935 that were old news in 1937. His view of the Führer remained consistent.

Minor alterations

There was only one significant deletion in the early part of the Great Contemporaries chapter. That was Churchill’s 1935 assertion that history would “determine whether [Hitler] will rank in Valhalla with Pericles, with Augustus and with Washington, or welter in the inferno of human scorn with Attila and Tamerlane.”

It is not clear what if anything the Foreign Office saw wrong with that. Churchill may have pulled it as a gesture of compliance. Or maybe, by 1937, he had decided that Hitler wouldn’t rank with Washington….

Nor were those words gone for long. On 10 October 1937, six days after publishing Great Contemporaries, they reappeared. This was in Churchill’s third Hitler article, “This Age of Government by Great Dictators,” for News of the World. For good measure, he wrote of Hitler’s “guilt of blood” and “wicked” methods.

Was this third essay a defiance of the Foreign Office? ​Or was it simply written because Churchill was too good a writer to omit a memorable line? Whatever the reason, it does not materially change ​his opinion of Hitler.

Other early changes to the 1935 text were almost all for readability or currency. A minor deletion was his reference to Heinrich Brüning, the anti-Hitler Chancellor of Weimer Germany in 1930-32. In his original Strand article, Churchill wrote that the Nazis “even drove the patriotic Brüning, under threat of murder, from German soil.”

Safe in America, Brüning became a professor of government at Harvard, where he continued to warn of German and Soviet expansionism. In 1937 Churchill asked him to proofread his Great Contemporaries Hitler chapter. Brüning’s only comment was, “I admire very much your description of the feelings of the German people in these fourteen years after the War and the characteristics of the British policy at that time.”

The major deletion

Not apparent until Ronald Cohen’s textual comparison was a long passage at the end of the 1935 Strand article removed from Great Contemporaries. It described the “Night of the Long Knives” in 1934, when Hitler purged Ernst Röhm and the Sturmabteilung (SA). This appears in no edition of the book, nor the Churchill Collected Essays. 

This passage did not appear in Churchill’s third article, “Government of Great Dictators.”  It may well have been considered provocative by the Foreign Office, albeit dated. Readers must judge for themselves. Since it is otherwise inaccessible, we reproduced it in full on the Churchill Project website. Here are excerpts.

From “Government of Great Dictators”

[On 30 June 1934] many hundreds of men and some women were put to death in Germany without law, without accusation, without trial. These persons represented many varieties of life and thought of Germany. There were Nazis and anti-Nazis. There were Generals and Communists; there were Jews, Protestants, and Catholics. Some were rich and some were poor; some were young and some were old; some were famous and some were humble. But all had one thing in common, namely, that they were deemed to be obnoxious or obstructive to the Hitler regime. Therefore, they were blotted out.

The history of the world is full of gruesome, squalid episodes of this kind, from the butcheries of ancient Rome and the numberless massacres which have stained the history of Asia down to the “smellings out” of the Zulu and Hottentot witch doctors. But in all its ups and downs mankind has always recoiled in horror from such events…

Adolf Hitler took upon himself the full responsibility…. But the astounding thing is that the great German people, educated, scientific, philosophical, romantic, the people of the Christmas tree, the people of Goethe and Schiller, of Bach and Beethoven, Heine, Leibnitz, Kant and a hundred other great names, have not only not resented this horrible blood-bath, but have endorsed it and acclaimed its author with the honours not only of a sovereign but almost of a god….

Can we really believe that a hierarchy and society built upon such deeds can be entrusted with the possession of the most prodigious military machinery yet planned among men? Can we believe that by such powers the world may regain “the joy, the peace and glory of mankind”? The answer, if answer there be, other than the most appalling negative, is contained in that mystery called HITLER.

The Hitler essays in retrospect

Churchill’s views plainly underwent no significant change during the two years spanning his three Hitler essays. If his original description of the Röhm purge disappeared, it did not affect the tenor of what he left in.

There is something about those excised passages that arrests the eye today. Because on 7 October 2023, much the same thing happened in Israel.

“All manner of people” were killed by murderers who “caught them in the streets, shot them in their beds, shot the wife who threw herself before her husband…. Sinister volleys succeeded each other through a long morning, afternoon and night.”

And again mankind recoiled in horror. The only difference seems to be that in 1934 Germany, “relations who ventured to inquire for the missing father, brother or son received, after a considerable interval, a small urn containing cremated ashes.” In 2023, the barbarians didn’t bother to do that.

Further reading

“Winston Churchill on Peace with Hitler,” 2023.

“Did Hitler Authorize the Flight of Rudolf Hess?” 2023.

“Hitler’s Sputtering Austrian Anschluss: Opportunity Missed?” 2020.

“The Myth that Churchill Admired Hitler,” 2017.

Hitler to the Reichstag, 7 March 1936

“We dedicate ourselves to achieving an understanding between the peoples of Europe and particularly an understanding with our Western peoples and neighbors. After three years, I believe that, with the present day, the struggle for German equal rights can be regarded as closed…. We have no territorial claims to make in Europe.” (Following this speech, Hitler dissolved the Reichstag.)

The Rhineland challenge 

The Rhineland in western Germany is bordered by the River Rhine in the east and France and the Benelux countries in the west. It includes the industrial Ruhr Valley, the famous cities of Aachen, Bonn, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Essen, Koblenz, Mannheim and Weissbaden, and several bridgeheads into Germany proper. 

After the end of the First World War, the Rhineland was occupied by the victorious Allies. Though the occupation was set to last through 1935, military forces withdrew in 1930 as a good-will gesture to the Weimar Republic. The Allies retained the right to reoccupy the Rhineland should Germany violate the Treaty of Versailles. 

In March 1936, a few thousand German troops marched into the Rhineland while the populace waved swastika flags. The soldiers had orders to “turn back and not to resist” if challenged by the all-dominant French Army. Hitler later said that the forty-eight hours following his action were the tensest of his life.

Churchill’s defenders correctly cite the Rhineland as confirming his warnings about Hitler. But what Churchill actually proposed to do about it is not as clear.

“Confronted by terrible circumstances” 

In January 1936, Churchill predicted that a Rhineland incursion would raise “a very grave European issue…. The League of Nations Union folk, who have done their best to get us disarmed, may find themselves confronted by terrible circumstances.”

Hitler’s future foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, recorded how Hitler conceived of slipping the occupation past the Western allies. Summoning Ribbentrop in January, Hitler said: “[I]t occurred to me last night how we can occupy the Rhineland without any friction. We return to the League!” Germany had left the League of Nations in 1933.  

Ribbentrop said he too (of course) had this very idea. He suggested they strike while the French and British were on one of their weekend holidays. Hitler acted on Saturday March 7th. France, he said had abrogated the Rhineland agreements by a military alliance with Russia. 

True to plan, Hitler added a sweetener, proposing “a real pacification of Europe between states that are equal in rights.” Germany would return to the League of Nations, provided her colonies, stripped at Versailles, were returned. 

Would France march? 

The question turned on France. Would she reassert control of the Rhineland? Or just dither and do nothing? Anthony Eden, Britain’s foreign secretary, was sanguine: Great Britain would stand by France, and he offered military staff conversations. 

Unfortunately for staff conversations, the French military was led by General Maurice Gamelin, a “nondescript fonctionnaire.” The French government may have yearned for a way to stop Hitler. Gamelin and his military colleagues were more worried about stopping him from invading France proper.

British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin believed France was unwilling to act—with or without Britain. Churchill was unsure, given the resolve of French Foreign Minister Pierre Flandin. Four days after Hitler’s action Flandin visited London. Churchill recalled: 

He told me he proposed to demand from the British Government simultaneous mobilisation of the land, sea, and air forces of both countries, and that he had received assurances of support from all the nations of the “Little Entente” [Czechoslovakia, Rumania and Yugoslavia] and from other States. He read out an impressive list of the replies received. There was no doubt that superior strength still lay with the Allies of the former war. They had only to act to win.

Baldwin’s reluctance 

Churchill urged Flandin to press his views with Baldwin, who was unsympathetic. He knew little of foreign affairs, he said, but he did know the British people wanted peace. Flandin modified his plea. Suppose the Anglo-French “invite” Hitler to leave, pending negotiations, which would probably restore the Rhineland to Germany anyway? Even this was too risky for Baldwin. “I have not the right to involve England,” he said. “Britain is not in a state to go to war.” Flandin was deflated, and as Baldwin suspected, the French cabinet was divided.

The pressure in Britain to avoid action was strong. At a dinner of ex-servicemen in Leicester, one of Churchill’s supporters, Leo Amery, gave a fiery speech. Britain’s very existence was threatened, he exclaimed. To the amazement of one observer, the ex-servicemen sided with the Germans. They said in effect: Why shouldn’t they have their own territory back? It’s no concern of ours.

“No fresh perplexities” 

Publicly, Churchill was being cautious. “I was careful not to diverge in the slightest degree from my attitude of severe though friendly criticism of Government policy,” he wrote. The friendliness is more evident than the severity. Churchill did urge a “coordinated plan” under the League of Nations to help France challenge the German action. This was denied. Sir Samuel Hoare replied that the necessary participants in such a plan were “totally unprepared from a military point of view.” 

Churchill had political reasons for treading lightly. He had been urging creation of a Ministry of Defense or Supply, which he hoped to be named to head. Baldwin duly announced a “Minister for the Coordination of Defense,” which was something less entirely. Worse, the job went to Solicitor General Sir Thomas Inskip, who knew nothing of the subject. 

Inskip’s appointment disappointed Churchill, who, hoping to be called to office, had carefully avoided public criticism of the government. Baldwin, Churchill reminisced, “thought, no doubt, that he had dealt me a politically fatal stroke, and I felt he might well be right.”

Churchill as peacemaker 

But Churchill still had an audience. He now began a series of fortnightly articles on foreign affairs for the Evening Standard. In the first, “Britain, Germany and Locarno,” he renewed his call for League of Nations intercession on the Rhineland. He insisted that there was a peaceful way to resolve the problem: 

The Germans claim that the Treaty of Locarno has been ruptured by the Franco-Soviet pact. That is their case and it is one that should be argued before the World Court at The Hague. The French have expressed themselves willing to submit this point to arbitration and to abide by the result. Germany should be asked to act in the same spirit and to agree. If the German case is good and the World Court pronounces that the Treaty of Locarno has been vitiated by the Franco-Soviet pact, then clearly the German action, although utterly wrong in method, can not be seriously challenged by the League of Nations.

This is not Churchill the defiant critic of appeasement, but Churchill the statesman. At this point he was urging prudence and adjudication. He did warn that if the League failed in its duty, it might cause events to “slide remorselessly downhill towards the pit in which Western civilization might be fatally engulfed.”  

He continued to urge strength and resolution: “I desire to see the collective forces of the world invested with overwhelming power. If you are going to depend on a slight margin, one way or the other, you will have war.”

Collective Security 

Churchill’s next article returned to his theme of unified action. This was no task for France and Britain alone, he declared. It was a task for all: “There may still be time. Let the States and people who lie in fear of Germany carry their alarms to the League of Nations at Geneva.” In the absence of French military action he was falling back on Collective Security. 

Aside from political considerations, Churchill was attempting to see things from the view of Britain’s closest ally. The French were “afraid of the Germans,” he wrote to The Times; France had joined the sanctions against Italy over Mussolini’s 1935 invasion of Abyssinia, and the resulting estrangement had given Hitler his Rhineland opportunity: 

In fact Mr. Baldwin’s Government, from the very highest motives, endorsed by the country at the General Election, has, without helping Abyssinia at all, got France into grievous trouble which has to be compensated by the precise engagement of our armed forces. Surely in the light of these facts, undisputed as I deem them to be, we might at least judge the French, with whom our fortunes appear to be so decisively linked, with a reasonable understanding….

Did Churchill waver? 

Winston Churchill favored a collective response to the Rhineland, recognizing its implications. One event followed the other, as the hardline Member of Parliament Robert Boothby recorded later:   

The military occupation of the Rhineland separated France from her allies in Eastern Europe. The occupation of Austria isolated Czechoslovakia. The betrayal of Czechoslovakia by the West isolated Poland. The defeat of Poland isolated France. The defeat of France isolated Britain. If Britain had been defeated, the United States would have been given true and total isolation for the first time.

Churchill certainly would have backed French reoccupation of the Rhineland. But evidence suggests that he knew the League was toothless. Churchill’s theme did not dramatically change in 1936; it merely evolved. As early as 1933 he had declared:  “Whatever way we turn there is risk. But the least risk and the greatest help will be found in re-creating the Concert of Europe.”

That was not to be. The failure of a concerted response over the Rhineland was to be repeated. Each time western statesmen hoped the latest Hitler inroad would be his last.

Prudence and statesmanship 

It is the belief of many thoughtful historians that Churchill said and did nothing about the Rhineland, even in the weeks after he had been denied office. His actions are more complex than that. He did give mixed signals, but he also proposed solutions. When France refused unilateral action, he favored collective action. His public declarations were hardly a clarion call. But we must bear in mind also that he was not in office.  

Churchill never admired Hitler, except in the narrow sense of Hitler’s political skills. There is no doubt that he spoke well of Mussolini, up to 1940. Was this because he admired Fascism, or because he hoped to influence the Italian dictator? Until the mid-1930s, Italo-German relations were precarious.

The Rhineland marked Churchill’s final disillusionment over the League of Nations. It impelled his efforts to secure Collective Security through “a coalition of the willing” (to use a more recent and perhaps uncomfortable phrase). The problem was that the willing were few—and demonstrably unwilling to cooperate. 

Author’s note 

This essay appeared in longer form in my book, Churchill and the Avoidable War: Could World War II Have Been Prevented? (2015). It was prompted years before by Robert Rhodes James’s argument that Churchill said and did nothing to stop Hitler over the Rhineland. I argued otherwise, and he kindly agreed to hear me out. Alas my piece appeared too late for his lifetime, and cost me his almost certain learned response. I miss my friend. RML 

Related articles

“Great Contemporaries: The Three Lives of Churchill’s Hitler Essays,” 2024.

“Robert Rhodes James: ‘A Good House of Commons Man,” 2023.

“Churchill and the Avoidable War,” 2015.

“Was the Second World War Avoidable?,” 2015.

MSNBC commentator Keith Olbermann is for the proposed American healthcare reform bill, which is neither here nor there.

What is interesting to Churchillians is his use of Winston Churchill’s words to support it—from both 1945 (when Churchill was campaigning against socialism), and 1936 (when Churchill was urging rearmament in the face of Nazi Germany).

In 1945, Olbermann says, Churchill

equated his opponents, the party that sought to introduce “The National Health,” to the Gestapo of the Germans that he and we had just beaten just as those opposing reform now have invoked Nazis as frequently and falsely as if they were invoking Zombies. Churchill cost himself the election because he didn’t realize he was overplaying an issue that people were already damned serious about.

Er…not exactly, Mr. O.

Churchill did not use the “Gestapo speech” to oppose Labour’s national health plan, which, in general at least, he supported (see next post). He used it to describe—in what was later thought to be a poor analogy—the kind of compulsion citizens might expect under a socialist government:

No Socialist Government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp, or violently-worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance. And this would nip opinion in the bud; it would stop criticism as it reared its head, and it would gather all the power to the supreme party and the party leaders, rising like stately pinnacles above their vast bureaucracies of Civil servants, no longer servants and no longer civil.

And where would the ordinary simple folk—the common people, as they like to call them in America—where would they be, once this mighty organism had got them in its grip? I stand for the sovereign freedom of the individual within the laws which freely elected Parliaments have freely passed.

It is an article of faith in “enlightened” circles that Churchill made a bad mistake by comparing the 1945 Labour Party, led by the kindly, self-effacing Clement Attlee, to Hitler’s political police. Maybe so.

But it strikes me as interesting when a friend in England, a confirmed Labour supporter, likens the tactics of certain modern Labour town councils in Britain precisely to those of the Gestapo: in their suppression of free speech; in their attempt to destroy those who disagree with them; in their vitriolic hatred of opposition media.

If Churchill’s words don’t put you in mind of certain recent developments in America, read on.

Olbermann now switches to the Churchill of 1936, who, he says,

made the greatest argument ever for government intervention in health care only [sic] he did not realize it. He was debating in Parliament the notion that the British government could not increase expenditures on military defense unless the voters specifically authorized it, just as today’s opponents of reform are now claiming they speak for the voters of today, even though those voters spoke for themselves eleven months ago.

Churchill’s argument was this: “I have heard it said that the government had no mandate….Such a doctrine is wholly inadmissible. The responsibility [of Ministers] for the public safety is absolute and requires no mandate.”

And there is the essence of what this is. What, on the eternal list of priorities, precedes health? What more obvious role could government have than the defense of the life, of each citizen? We cannot stop every germ that seeks to harm us any more than we can stop every person who seeks to harm us. But we can try dammit and government’s essential role in that effort facilitate it, reduce its cost, broaden its availability, improve my health and yours, seems, ultimately, self-explanatory. [sic]

We want to live. What is government for if not to help us do so? Indeed Mr. Churchill, the responsibility for the public safety is absolute and requires no mandate!

Leave aside the question of whether the current healthcare proposal would expand or shrink access to healthcare. To equate it with a threat to a nation’s existence is quite a stretch. But let’s start by quoting all of what Churchill said, on 12 November 1936:

I have heard it said that the Government had no mandate for rearmament until the General Election. Such a doctrine is wholly inadmissible. The responsibility of Ministers for the public safety is absolute and requires no mandate. It is in fact the prime object for which Governments come into existence. The Prime Minister had the command of enormous majorities in both Houses of Parliament ready to vote for any necessary measures of defence.

“The responsibility for the public safety is absolute.” Indeed so: the safety of the nation against those who would snuff it out. That is, inarguably, “the prime object for which Governments come into existence.” They do not come into existence to pass out largess until the public till is exhausted and the currency debased. The American government was not created to force every citizen to buy a good or service—which is part of the current healthcare proposal, but nowhere authorized by the United States Constitution. And has never before been mandated in history.

True, the President does have “the command of enormous majorities.” Yet he seems unable to make them “vote for any necessary measures.” Why?

It would behoove him, and the Congress, and the rest of us to ask. Is it, for example, because 75% of citizens are happy with their healthcare? Or because they prefer piecemeal solutions that are more easily monitored—tort reform and portability, for example—to a comprehensive plan that would inevitably lead to massive spending and rationing? Or because a large majority fear that like Medicare, which will go broke inside a decade unless altered, this amplification of Medicare will also go broke—or exclude many for whom Medicare is now accessible? Or because it will require punitive taxes? Or because they can see no example of anything run efficiently by government, from the Postal Service to the war in Afghanistan? All these are legitimate objections, and people are not Nazis to express them.

Salon.com, which agrees with Mr. Olbermann about health reform, says he did nothing to advance their cause: that his argument is self-defeating:

[He dug] up a Churchill quote from the 1930s where the former British prime minister insisted government had a right to provide for people’s well-being. But what was the point? Churchill is dead; the healthcare reform plan isn’t remotely modeled on Britain’s National Health Service; the only people who think it is are the conservative opponents of reform.

In the narrow sense, that’s a rejection of Olbermann’s argument. In a broader sense, Salon is also right. Churchill is dead. This is not 1936 or 1945. Lady Soames is often wont to remark: “You must never suggest what my father would do or say about any modern issue—after all, how do you know?”

What her father said about liberty never goes out of fashion, and here is the most memorable sentence in  his “Gestapo speech” of 1945: “I stand for the sovereign freedom of the individual.”

Of course, Churchill’s times are often paralleled in ours. That’s the value of studying history—how Churchill reacted to challenges which may seem familiar to thoughtful people. And, since Mr. Olbermann likes to tell us what reminds him of Hitler, let me say what reminds me of Hitler.

It is people who think it appropriate to offer an email address where Americans can report anything “fishy” they might see or hear emanating from the thoughts and opinions of other Americans. That reminds me of the Gestapo.

It is a teacher who makes little schoolchildren chant, “Mm, mmm, mm! He said that all must lend a hand, To make this country strong again, Mmm, mmm, mm!
He said we must be fair today, Equal work means equal pay….Hello, Mr. President we honor you today!
 For all your great accomplishments, we all doth say hooray!”—set to the music of “Jesus Loves the Little Children.”

That reminds me of the Hitler Youth.

Commentator Mark Whitting writes: “This is going beyond the beyonds, as this writer’s Irish granny used to say.”

That, Mr. Whitting, is putting it mildly.

If we are going to draw anything from Churchill’s “Gestapo speech” that bears on our current situation, it might be what Churchill said about gathering “all the power to the supreme party and the party leaders, rising like stately pinnacles above their vast bureaucracies of civil servants, no longer servants and no longer civil.

“And where would the ordinary simple folk—the common people, as they like to call them in America—where would they be, once this mighty organism had got them in its grip?”