Abstract
Reviewed by: Bradley W. Hart, California State University, Fresno, USA
The subtitle of Russell Wallis’ book suggests that its focus is on ‘Nazi Atrocities’, by which most readers would probably infer anti-Semitic violence and actions against other minority groups in the Third Reich. Unfortunately, readers making this understandable assumption will be somewhat confused by the book’s contents.
Wallis’ study begins with a wide-ranging examination of British elite and popular attitudes towards a number of atrocities, ranging from German war crimes during the First World War to British violence in India and Ireland. Discussions about the origins of international law and Just War Theory are also included, sometimes to the detriment of narrative flow.
These sections are all well-researched and interesting, but it is initially unclear to the reader how a multi-page background discussion of the Black and Tans and the Irish Republican Army (74–80), followed by a discussion of atrocities committed by both the Greek and Turkish armies in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire and British reactions towards them (80–8), are directly relevant to what appears to be the book’s main thesis. The Nazis themselves only show up on page 94, more than a third of the way through the main text, and surprisingly the section starts with Adolf Hitler taking power in 1933 rather than a discussion of the extensive Nazi violence against Jews, socialists, communists and other groups before 1933.
The book begins to change course around page 100, with an extended discussion of how British elite and press opinion was initially willing to offer Hitler’s regime the benefit of the doubt when stories of German violence filtered into the country (though they rarely appeared in the press without having their accuracy questioned). ‘The desire, almost a yearning, to understand the “German” viewpoint was too entrenched’, Wallis argues (95). Whitehall apologists for Hitler consistently argued that the Führer was more moderate than he presented himself, and they, like many, had already convinced themselves that many of Germany’s complaints about the Treaty of Versailles were legitimate.
A lengthy deviation then discusses the geopolitical situation in Manchuria (120) and British relations with Japan and China. Then the Abyssinia crisis comes to the fore. Wallis shows that Britain’s policy towards Italy was confused and inconsistent, and the Abyssinians ‘were regularly endowed with so-called British values, a process that signified widespread identification with their plight’ (141). The Spanish Civil War and its atrocities (including the Guernica bombing) are given extended consideration (148–57) before the focus returns to Japan and China. This series of accounts makes chronological sense, but again the immediate links between the events being described and the book’s main theme are somewhat unclear and bewildering to readers expecting the Anglo-German focus to reappear.
The book’s final chapter is really the first to directly address the topic of Nazi anti-Semitism and its impact in Britain. Wallis convincingly argues that continuing faith in the German people to prevent the outbreak of war despite the provocations of their Nazi leaders led many Britons to take an unduly optimistic attitude towards the various crises that preceded 1939. The anti-Jewish violence of the Kristallnacht was rationalized by many newspapers as a domestic affair for the German people rather than a matter for international condemnation (or a change to British immigration policies) (184–5). This continuing assumption that most Germans ‘were essentially reasonable, even members of the Nazi party’ led many British elites to believe that the stories of anti-Semitic atrocities increasingly emerging from Germany were either exaggerated or reflected a trend that would eventually right itself without outside interference (192).
This view would carry tragic consequences. Wallis’ account ends rather early, in 1942, with the wartime announcement in Parliament by Anthony Eden that Hitler appeared to be attempting to exterminate Europe’s Jewish population. With the war now already years underway, Wallis argues, the overwhelming consensus was that while this news was ‘tragic, nothing much could be done to help Jews’ (222). Even after the mass killing of Jews became widespread knowledge, a surprising number of elites simply refused to believe that it reflected German government policy or a deliberate effort at extermination.
Wallis’ conclusion is that the atrocities that preceded the Second World War conditioned British responses to violence toward Jews. ‘An enduring sense of admiration for Germany’s cultural achievements, a national sense of guilt over Germany’s treatment during the First World War and after, a concomitant sense of shame about British colonial atrocities, a desire for peace and a pervasive belief that Germans were “just like us,” were factors that made this possible’, he writes (236–7). Specifically, he argues that the British public was simply less willing to view Jews as victims than it had been willing to consider many other groups, including the Belgians, Chinese and Abyssinians, as such (239).
This is a well-researched and dense book that does a good job examining British reactions to a wide range of atrocities, mostly committed by Germany but not exclusively, in the twentieth century. Wallis has produced important insights into how British opinion leaders and policymakers understood these acts in a variety of geographic locations and rationalized their responses (or lack thereof) to them. His sources are wide ranging, and while there is a conscious focus on press sources and the correspondence of elites, he also uses Mass Observation data to find vignettes reflecting the views of more average citizens.
For a study providing such important new information, however, a more accurate title would have been a boon. This is a book not so much about Nazi atrocities (it ends too early to really discuss these in any depth) than it is about early twentieth century atrocities that conditioned the British public to view victims and perpetrators in particular ways. A title reflecting the true breadth of its coverage would have only widened its impact.