The Munich Agreement as History and Analogy - Melanie Phillips

80 Years since the Munich Agreement

Joint conference of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung Israel

Good morning, everybody. Boker tov. Thank you for inviting me here today. I’m supposed to be speaking to you about the role the media played in shaping public opinion to support the Munich Agreement. I should make a disclaimer at the very beginning that I am a journalist. I’m not a historian, and even more than my shame and ignominy at being a journalist, I’m someone who has worked and do work for some of the newspapers who played a totally inglorious role in the Munich debacle.

When people think of Britain and the Second World War, they think of 1940 and the Blitz, and if you’ve seen the movie Churchill, which I highly recommend if you haven’t seen it, you will think of Britain in the way that Britain likes think of itself as we stood alone. We stood alone in 1940 against the Nazi threat, and we were vital in the defeat of Hitler, and that’s entirely true. But what’s less known and certainly not talked about in Britain, I think at all, is that until the beginning of the Second World War, Britain was the country of appeasement, the country of Munich, the Munich Agreement. When Chamberlain returned from Munich, waving his piece of paper and saying, “Peace in our time,” he was cheered by Britain to the rafters. So much is reasonably well known. So the question is why appeasement was so much in vogue in Britain, and how important was the media in shaping that view? Now, much has been made of the actual support for Fascism by certain newspapers and politicians and their support of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, otherwise known as the Blackshirts. In 1933, the Daily Mail, for which I have worked, claimed that British newspapers had been full of, quote, “rabid reports of Nazi excesses.” Instead, the newspaper claimed of these, that these rabid reports weren’t true. Instead, Hitler had saved Germany from, quote, “Israelites of international attachments and that the minor misdeeds of individual Nazis will be submerged by the immense benefits that the new regime is already bestowing upon Germany.” In January 1934, Lord Rothermere, who owned both the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror, wrote under his own byline articles that appeared in both papers, which were headlined “Hurrah for the Blackshirts” and “Give the Blackshirts a helping hand.”

Although his support for Mosley in Britain duly waned, Lord Rothermere remained an admirer of both Hitler and Mussolini, and he met and corresponded with Hitler, even congratulating him on his annexation of Czechoslovakia. But as soon as the war started, however, in 1939, the Mail turned on a dime and it reversed its position. Rothermere, that Lord Rothermere, died in 1940. His son Esmond assumed control of the paper the previous year, and from the outbreak of the war the Mail did not express any support for Hitler at all. Now, the Mail wasn’t the most influential paper. The most influential paper, you could say, was The Times because it was the mouthpiece of the establishment. The editor of The Times until 1941, Geoffrey Dawson, who’s already been mentioned, was actually a member of a pro-Hitler group called “the Anglo-German fellowship.” It’s been claimed, I think very authoritatively, that Dawson censored the reports by The Times’ own correspondent in Berlin at the time, Norman Ebbutt. An American journalist in Berlin at the same time, William Shirer, commented, quote: “The trouble for Ebbutt was that his newspaper, the most esteemed in England, would not publish much of what he reported. The Times in those days was doing its best to appease Hitler and to induce the British government to do likewise. The unpleasant truths that Ebbutt telephones nightly to London from Berlin were often kept out of the great newspaper.” But in March 1939, The Times also reversed course and called for war preparations.

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Melanie Phillips – Journalist and columnist for The Times (UK) and the Jerusalem Post

[robertewing]

Waving his piece of paper, you could hardly fail to present that slur, saying debacle and appeasement, and even how the British people prefer to think, they prefer to think like you, which is why people like you say waved the document, the people do not want to see the reality, and we know what the reality was that motivated the holding of the document in the air because his private secretary related their conversation - evidently the policy you call appeasement never existed.