Ludovici on Hitler

As guests of the Nazi Party, who wished to introduce us to every aspect of the new Germany they were creating, we were not allowed much peace. Having given us a kind and considerate young Foreign Office official as a bear-leader, we were taken to all important meetings and driven round the country to inspect the various camps, training centres and institutions which owed their existence to the new regime. As we had arrived just in time for the First of May celebrations, our first few days were pretty full.

In the course of our stay we were able to hear Hitler speak several times, and were always given such privileged seats at his meetings that we were able to get a close view of him and all his leading colleagues in the government. As Sanderson was partly blind and understood no German, I was compelled to be not only his visual aid but also his interpreter, and this compelled me to attend with particular care to all that was said and to all there was to see.

Of the whole bunch of men around Hitler, Blomberg—the C-in-C of that period—was by far the best and most distinguished-looking. The others—i.e., Goebbels, Himmler, Schirach, Hess, Funk, Ribbentrop and Goering—all struck me as commonplace, if not actually common. I disliked Hess and Ribbentrop, but little Goebbels, with whom I discussed Nietzsche, seemed to me rather attractive and the most intelligent of the lot. At a lunch Ribbentrop gave us at the English Club I tried repeatedly to convince him that the opposition to the Nazi regime, and above all to Hitler’s often high-handed behaviour vis-à-vis of neighbouring states, was much stronger in England, especially among influential Englishwomen, than he and his colleagues seemed to think; and I pointed out that women of all classes in England were inclined to resent any movement which, like the Nazi regime, was predominantly masculine in spirit. Incidentally, the unanimity with which Englishwomen subsequently backed the war party in England, often against their menfolk’s views, abundantly confirmed my opinion of their attitude in 1936.

I had, however, little success with Ribbentrop, who seemed quite unconvinced. Before the luncheon party dispersed, therefore, I button-holed his secretary and begged him to repeat my warning to his chief. But judging from the generally protzig144 attitude of many of the Party officials at that time, I doubt whether even he listened very sympathetically to my appeal. Captain Fitzroy Fyers, as he was then, who happened also to be among the English guests at the 1936 Party Rally and who spent much time with me in Nürnberg, will remember that on the afternoon of the 12th of September, the last day of our stay, I told him that the greatest danger of all in my opinion was precisely this Protzigkeit of the leading officials of the Party. It was particularly marked in Himmler, with whom I spent some time that same afternoon together with the Duchess of Brunswick and her charming daughter. I thought him most objectionable, and much as I liked the two ladies I was glad to part company with him.

Later that evening, however, I had the good fortune to come across the two ladies again, for I sat between them at the dinner Himmler gave us at the Police HQ, and I vividly remember something Frederika—the Kaiser’s granddaughter, now Queen of Greece—said to me. We were discussing English schools, and she told me that when she was at her English school (North Foreland Lodge, near Basingstoke) after World War I, and the whole school assembled for morning prayers, they often sang the Ancient and Modern hymn which has the same melody as Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles, and, as often as this happened, so she would have to cry. Ultimately, this was brought to the notice of the headmistress, who at once forbade the singing of that hymn as long as Frederika remained a pupil at the school.

My two most pleasant memories of Nazi Germany are my meeting with this young lady and her mother and my visit to the Duke of Saxe-Coburg in the previous May. His Grace was a most charming personality, and our talk during the tea he gave Sanderson and me at his house in or near Berlin was one of my most interesting experiences during that first visit to Nazi Germany.

I must have heard Hitler speak in public about a dozen times, but I met him to talk to only once, at the Englischer Hof Hotel in September 1936, where he gave the whole of the English visitors a tea. I was perhaps too much preoccupied in studying his features to do more than exchange a few words about Nietzsche with him, but I had time to have a good look at his hands and to observe his manner in private intercourse. He was extraordinarily self-possessed among us all and very gracious in the attention he paid to every one of his guests in turn. A moment later I heard him arguing animatedly with a man whom I believed to be Ward Price of the Daily Mail.145 But it all ended in a good laugh, so I assumed that the argument had been friendly.

One was easily carried away by the amazing eloquence, sincerity and passion of his public utterances, and no-one who has heard him and who was capable of understanding what he said could fail to appreciate the reason of his irresistible appeal to all classes of the community. Many hostile critics, especially women, have led their English readers to believe that there was something hysterical and even pathological about his oratory and manner in public. But after watching him with particular care during many of his addresses, I saw no sign of anything of the sort. All about me in the audience were retired generals and field officers, professional men of all ages, and dignified sexagenarians who had had distinguished careers as judges, magistrates, university professors, etc., and I refuse to believe that they could have sat there, listening as reverently as they did, often with tears trickling down their cheeks, if they had been aware of any of the contemptible characteristics which hostile and bitterly biased English reporters imagined they saw in his public demeanour. Unfortunately, the falsehoods these people fabricated for the consumption of the ignorant newspaper-reader in England were only too readily accepted as facts, and of course enjoyed, by all those who were anxious to disparage the German leader. How distant seemed the days when even a Russian general could punish a subordinate for sneering at Napoleon, and that century BC when a Caesar could praise his enemies!

Nevertheless, I was always a little uneasy about some of Hitler’s physical characteristics, for, believing as I do in the inseparability of body and mind, I could not help fearing lest in his character and actions these physical stigmata might eventually make their influence felt. There was, for instance, one feature at least of his face which indicated coarse, if not low, breeding. From above the bridge of his nose his mask was reminiscent of Bismarck and therefore most impressive, but his mouth revealed negative traits, and his eyes had an ominous outward cast. The lower part of his nose, moreover, owing to its recessive septum, presented a dark, ugly appearance as of a large inverted thimble.

In an article I wrote for the English Review in 1937 I discussed the Führer’s morphology in some detail, and as this article was not accepted by the editors of the Review it may be worthwhile to quote certain essential passages from it:

When I first met Adolf Hitler,146 I had already had about a dozen opportunities of closely observing him and hearing him speak. On two of these twelve occasions, I had had the exceptional advantage of being able to watch him for hours at a stretch at comparatively close quarters—i.e., from a first-tier box at the Nürnberg Opera House. The first occasion was a gala performance of Wagner’s Meistersinger (September 8th 1936), when he sat in the centre box in the same tier as mine; and on the second occasion, a day or two later, he stood well forward on an improvised platform built over the orchestra pit, to deliver an address on culture and the National Socialist state.

He is middle-aged and of medium height. Stockily built and fairly muscular, he is a so-called ‘dark-blond’ with eyes that betray the blond strain in his ancestry. He moves with energy and decision, but never jerkily. The general serenity of his person makes his occasional outbursts of passion all the more forcible. He has not the height that Symonds and Sheldon associate with leadership and aggressiveness; but he has the solidity, the deep manly voice, the commanding glance and gesture and the deliberation which inspire confidence. Nor should it be forgotten that although Confucius, Caesar, Edward I, de Gaulle etc. were all tall men, the first exceptionally so, Alexander the Great, Mahomet, Napoleon, Wellington and Frederick the Great were all either short or of only medium height. Frederick the Great was actually much below medium height.

The Führer has a fine intelligent brow and well-shaped ears in which every part is normally represented. Some morphologists attach much importance to this, because the stigmata of degeneration rarely occur singly, and malformations and irregularities in the ear, such as absence of the lobule [very common nowadays], or of the helix at the top of the pinna, or of the anti-helix, are therefore significant.

Against these good features are two less favourable physiognomic traits which however no-one who knew Hitler seems to have noticed. I refer to the outward cast of his eyes and an abnormally high nasal septum. The former, besides indicating a lack of stamina, often associated with a tendency to romanticism and vagueness . . . As to the latter, in which the wings of the nostrils fall below the level of the septum . . this is a very unbecoming feature associated with random and low breeding. But no accurate morphological description should omit to mention it as it inevitably implies corresponding characterological traits. Even in a nobler mask than Hitler’s it would still constitute a disquieting blemish. It is therefore important to bear it in mind when we speculate on the Führer’s probable role in Europe’s future.

Finally, I made a few remarks about his lack of sound bodily coordination which, I said, ‘might occasion disquiet in the minds of all the true friends of the regime.’

This article was one of a series I was contributing to the English Review on the Third Reich, but to my surprise it was returned to me by the editors with the following note:

42 Upper Grosvenor St. W1
23.3.1937

Dear Ludovici,

Many thanks for sending along your article upon Hitler’s morphology. I have read it through with the very greatest interest myself—but both Walker-Smith and myself agree that it is hardly suitable for the English Review . . . I know you will understand when I say that, looked at broadly, we are rather doubtful about publishing it.

Yours sincerely,
Peter Brassey

Of course I understood! Thus, sugared as the pill was—for I had tried to give my warning as diplomatically as possible in order to avoid displeasing the German Embassy staff—the English Review editors nevertheless thought my deliberately temperate article too dangerous for publication in their magazine. Evidently they knew the political atmosphere in Europe at that time to be too thundery to allow of their printing the article with safety.

One last word about Hitler and I shall not need to discuss him further.

In this intellectually servile and sterile age, when both the high and the low in the land are equally sequacious and subservient, propaganda pays handsomely, whether in commercial advertising or in inculcating upon the population the opinions which the Establishment think it good for us to hold. Now, among these opinions none has been more diligently dinned into us than that the German people’s acceptance of Hitler must indicate some morbid and unpleasant flaw in the German mentality. And as in modern England it suffices for such a view to be stated only once by some recognised member of the Establishment for it to be immediately taken up and re-echoed by thousands of lesser people, it follows that today one can hardly open a book or listen to a BBC broadcast in which it is not emphatically stated that, in accepting with almost complete unanimity a ‘mental defective’ such as Hitler, the German nation gave proof of its fundamental perversity.

A typical presentation of this view, which can now be found paraphrased in innumerable forms by prominent English people, from Mr Robert Birley, the Head of Eton, to the most ignorant female journalist, is that made by Colin Welch in his review of William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, when he asked: ‘Why on earth, for instance, did such a richly gifted people as the Germans prostitute themselves to become the tools of a maniac?’

Now, apart from the fact that the author of this rhetorical outburst, like all those who now obediently toe the Establishment’s line, takes for granted that his readers, who in other contexts would pride themselves on demanding the evidence, will meekly accept the statement that Hitler was in fact a maniac, can the host of parrots who repeat this rengaine147 about the German people’s turpitude in accepting Hitler ever have asked themselves what Hitler meant to Germany in the decades following World War I?

The minute minority of Englishmen who happen to be well-informed do not need to be reminded of Germany’s outstanding achievements in scholarship, science, music, philosophy and poetry, or to be told that a nation possessing the record of which she could justly boast in 1914 must necessarily have her pride, her consciousness of high endowments, entitling her to feel a worthy example of what European civilisation has so far produced. When, therefore, such a nation is humiliated, vilified and degraded as Germany was after World War I, the pain it undergoes is naturally proportionate to the honourable position it knew itself to have reached in the family of Western peoples. The blow to its self-esteem must have been—could not help having been—staggering.

Let anyone, even outside this minute minority of well-informed Englishmen, imagine what England would have felt had she been similarly humiliated, or merely recall what England did feel after the retreat from Dunkirk, and the whole picture assumes a different aspect.

It was thus to a Germany still suffering acutely from the wounds of such a humiliation that suddenly someone appeared who contrived to restore the country’s self-esteem and helped it to recover its self-respect and sense of worthiness. Naturally, inevitably, the response was one of rapturous gratitude and affection. Even if Hitler had really been the monster the Establishment wished us to believe he was, the enthusiastic response to his appeal would still be comprehensible.

Had not no less a person than Lord Lothian expressed his admiration for the conditions introduced by Hitler’s regime? Nor, as we know, was he by any means the only Englishman who felt this way. In the Times of 1st February 1934, speaking of National Socialism, he had written that it has given ‘Germany unity where it was terribly divided; it has produced a stable government, and restored to Germany national self-respect and international standing.’

These are the words of a sincere Liberal. Do they indicate that the charge of lunacy against Hitler and his administration was justified? Besides, we must remember that the German nation’s humiliation after 1918 was not confined to the terms of the Versailles Treaty. There was also the degradation and deep injury inflicted on them by Allied troops, who occupied their country for years after the armistice. As a tourist it was not possible to learn the full magnitude of these injuries, but I remember when I visited friends in Düren in 1922 that the account I was given of the behaviour of the French black troops in the town appalled both my wife and myself.

‘The Germans, a proud people,’ says Mr Abel J. Jones, ‘were reduced to such a state of humiliation as to welcome anyone, however unlikely or dangerous, promising to restore their confidence and pride.’148

The intelligence and understanding, not to mention the charity, revealed in this passage are admittedly quite exceptional in present-day ‘fair-minded’ England, and show a defiance of the Establishment reminiscent of more creditable eras in British history than that covered by the last thirty years. But the fact that at least one Englishman can have been found to express such a view suggests that, in any case, as recently as 1945 some good sense and psychological insight still existed in the nation.

For what F. L. Lucas so aptly remarks of the Age of Reason applies with even greater force to this age—namely, that it owes ‘some of its most fatal mistakes to bad psychology.’149A notorious but by no means isolated example of the lengths to which blind prejudice against the German nation could go after the rise of Hitler is to be found in Lord Frederick Hamilton’s The Days before Yesterday. Speaking of the word Schadenfreude, which means pleasure over another’s troubles, the noble author says: ‘How characteristic it is that there should be no equivalent in another language for this peculiarly Teutonic emotion!’150

But, apart from La Rochefoucauld’s implicit claim regarding the prevalence of this emotion, when he wrote, ‘Dans l’adversité de nos meilleurs amis nous trouvons toujours quelque chose qui nous ne déplait pas,’151 what would Lord Frederick Hamilton and his readers say or think if a German, calling attention to the word ‘bully’—which means either using one’s strength to hurt, injure or oppress one weaker than oneself, or else a person who is guilty of such behaviour—remarked: ‘How characteristic it is that there should be no equivalent in another language for this peculiarly English weakness and type’?

Yet there is as much, if not more, justification for such a remark as there is for Lord Frederick Hamilton’s about Schadenfreude. Nor need the reader search very long for evidence of the prevalence of both the weakness itself or the type stricken with it.

Let him but read the following: T. Medwin’s Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley,152Poems of E. B. Browning,153 S. M. Ellis’s Wilkie Collins, Le Fanu and Others,154 Lady G. Cecil’s Life of Robert Marquis of Salisbury,155 A. L. Kennedy’s Salisbury,156 John Cowper Powys’s Autobiography,157 Sir Ian Hamilton’s When I Was a Boy,158 Viscount Mersey’s A Picture of Life,159 K. W. Jones’s The Maugham Enigma,160 L. S. Amery’s My Political Life,161 C. R. Sanders’ The Strachey Family,162 Kipling’s Something of Myself163 and Kenneth Robinson’s Wilkie Collins.164

From these few books—and I could quote many more—the reader will be able to conclude not only that the vice of bullying and the bully type is widespread in England, but also that the type itself is by no means restricted to the least cultivated and most uncivilised strata of the population, for among the facts contained in the above-mentioned books he will find that two of the worst bullies ultimately became respected and famous Archbishops of Canterbury. I refer to Archbishops Temple and Benson.

As far as I know, no German has so far made the comment about the word ‘bully’ which would be the suitable retort to Lord Frederick’s too hasty remark about Schadenfreude, but meanwhile I have attempted to repair the omission.

After having for two thousand years been exhorted not to behold the mote in your brother’s eye before having first considered the beam in your own,165 it is disappointing to find how frequently the admonition is ignored, especially in modern England.

Ludovici
Confessions of an Anti-Feminist

Notes

[144] Truculent or arrogant.—Ed.
[145] Author of I Know These Dictators, London, 1937; revised edition, 1938; and Extra-Special Correspondent, London, 1957.—Ed.
[146] Which was on the occasion of my second visit to Nazi Germany.
[147] Same old story.—Ed.
[148] In Search of Truth, 1945, Chapter 3, 2.
[149] The Art of Living, 1959, Chapter 1.
[150] 1920, Chapter 4.
[151] Maxims, 99. ‘In the misfortune of our best friends we always find something which is not displeasing to us.’—Ed.
[152] 1847, Volume I, Chapter 1.
[153] Preface to the 1887 edition.
[154] 1931, Chapter 5.
[155] 1921, Volume I, Chapter 1.
[156] 1953, Prologue.
[157] 1934, III, IV.
[158] 1939, III, IV and VII.
[159] 1941, Chapter 1.
[160] 1954, 112, Section 18.
[161] 1953, Volume I, Chapter 1.
[162] 1953, Chapter 15.
[163] 1937, Chapters 1 and 2.
[164] 1951, Chapter 2.
[165] Matthew 7.3.