Was it a good strategy to push Hitler eastwards?

     This point of view was supported by the second group, which was known in those days as the Round Table Group, and came later to be called, somewhat inaccurately, the Cliveden Set, after the country estate of Lord and Lady Astor.

It included Lord Milner, Leopold Amery, and Edward Grigg (Lord Altrincham), as well as Lord Lothian, Smuts, Lord Astor, Lord Brand (brother-in-law of Lady Astor and managing director of Lazard Brothers, the international bankers), Lionel Curtis, Geoffrey Dawson (editor of The Times), and their associates. This group wielded great influence because it controlled the Rhodes Trust, the Beit Trust, The Times of London, The Observer, the influential and highly anonymous quarterly review known as The Round Table (founded in 1910 with money supplied by Sir Abe Bailey and the Rhodes Trust, and with Lothian as editor), and it dominated the Royal Institute of International Affairs, called "Chatham House" (of which Sir Abe Bailey and the Astors were the chief financial supporters, while Lionel Curtis was the actual founder), the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, and All Souls College, Oxford.

This Round Table Group formed the core of the three-bloc-world supporters, and differed from the anti-Bolsheviks like D'Abernon in that they sought to contain the Soviet Union between a German-dominated Europe and an English-speaking bloc rather than to destroy it as the anti-Bolsheviks wanted. Relationships between the two groups were very close and friendly, and some people, like Smuts, were in both.

     The anti-Bolsheviks, including D'Abernon, Smuts, Sir John Simon, and H. A. L. Fisher (Warden of All Souls College), were willing to go to any extreme to tear down France and build up Germany.

Their point of view can be found in many places, and most emphatically in a letter of August I l, 1920, from D'Abernon to Sir Maurice (later Lord) Hankey, a prot้g้ of Lord Esher who wielded great influence in the inter-war period as secretary to the Cabinet and secretary to almost every international conference on reparations from Genoa (1922) to Lausanne (1932).

D'Abernon advocated a secret alliance of Britain "with the German military leaders in cooperating against the Soviet." As ambassador of Great Britain in Berlin in 1920-1926, D'Abernon carried on this policy and blocked all efforts by the Disarmament Commission to disarm, or even inspect, Germany (according to Brigadier J. H. Morgan of the commission).

     The point of view of this group was presented by General Smuts in a speech of October 23, 1923 (made after luncheon with H. A. L. Fisher). From these two groups came the Dawes Plan and the Locarno pacts. It was Smuts, according to Stresemann, who first suggested the Locarno policy, and it was D'Abernon who became its chief supporter. H. A. L. Fisher and John Simon in the House of Commons, and Lothian, Dawson, and their friends on The Round Table and on The Times prepared the ground among the British governing class for both the Dawes Plan and Locarno as early as 1923 (The Round Table for March 1923; the speeches of Fisher and Simon in the House of Commons on February 19, 1923, Fisher's speech of March 6th and Simon's speech of March 13th in the same place, The Round Table for June 1923; and Smuts's speech of October 23rd).

     The more moderate Round Table group, including Lionel Curtis, Leopold Amery (who was the shadow of Lord Milner), Lord Lothian, Lord Brand, and Lord Astor, sought to weaken the League of Nations and destroy all possibility of collective security in order to strengthen Germany in respect to both France and the Soviet Union, and above all to free Britain from Europe in order to build up an "Atlantic bloc" of Great Britain, the British Dominions, and the United States.

They prepared the way for this "Union" through the Rhodes Scholarship organization (of which Lord Milner was the head in 1905-1925 and Lord Lothian was secretary in 1925-1940), through the Round Table groups (which had been set up in the United States, India, and the British Dominions in T 910- 1917), through the Chatham House organization, which set up Royal Institutes of International Affairs in all the dominions and a Council on Foreign Relations in New York, as well as through "Unofficial Commonwealth Relations Conferences" held irregularly, and the Institutes of Pacific Relations set up in various countries as autonomous branches of the Royal Institutes of International Affairs.

This influential group sought to change the League of Nations from an instrument of collective security to an international conference center for "nonpolitical" matters like drug control or international postal services, to rebuild Germany as a buffer against the Soviet Union and a counterpoise to France, and to build up an Atlantic bloc of Britain, the Dominions, the United States, and, if possible, the Scandinavian countries.

     One of the effusions of this group was the project called Union Now, and later Union Now with Great Britain, propagated in the United States in 1938-1945 by Clarence Streit on behalf of Lord Lothian and the Rhodes Trust. Ultimately, the inner circle of this group arrived at the idea of the "three-bloc world."

It was believed that this system could force Germany to keep the peace (after it absorbed Europe) because it would be squeezed between the Atlantic bloc and the Soviet Union, while the Soviet Union could be forced to keep the peace because it would be squeezed between Japan and Germany.

This plan would work only if Germany and the Soviet Union could be brought into contact with each other by abandoning to Germany Austria, Czechoslovakia, and the Polish Corridor. This became the aim of both the anti-Bolsheviks and the three-bloc people from the early part of 1937 to the end of 1939 (or even early 1940).

These two cooperated and dominated the government in that period. They split in the period 1939-1940, with the "three-bloc" people, like Amery, Lord Halifax, and Lord Lothian, becoming increasingly anti-German, while the anti-Bolshevik crowd, like Chamberlain, Horace Wilson, and John Simon, tried to adopt a policy based on a declared but unfought war against Germany combined with an undeclared fighting war against the Soviet Union. The split between these two groups appeared openly in public and led to Chamberlain's fall from office when Amery cried to Chamberlain, across the floor of the House of Commons, on May 10, 1940, "In the name of God, go!"

     Outside these two groups, and much more numerous (but much more remote from the real instruments of government), were the appeasers and the "peace at any price" people. These were both used by the two inner groups to command public support for their quite different policies. Of the two the appeasers were much more important than the "peace at any price" people.

The appeasers swallowed the steady propaganda (much of it emanating from Chatman House, The Times, the Round Table groups, or Rhodes circles) that the Germans had been deceived and brutally treated in 1919. For example, it was under pressure from seven persons, including General Smuts and H. A. L. Fisher, as well as Lord Milner himself, that Lloyd George made his belated demand on June 2, 1919, that the German reparations be reduced and the Rhineland occupation be cut from fifteen years to two.

The memorandum from which Lloyd George read these demands was apparently drawn up by Philip Kerr (Lord Lothian), while the minutes of the Council of Four, from which we get the record of those demands, were taken down by Sir Maurice Hankey (as secretary to the Supreme Council, a position obtained through Lord Esher).

It was Kerr (Lothian) who served as British member of the Committee of Five which drew up the answer to the Germans' protest of May, 1 919. General Smuts was still refusing to sign the treaty because it was too severe as late as June 2 3, 1919.

     As a result of these attacks and a barrage of similar attacks on the treaty which continued year after year, British public opinion acquired a guilty conscience about the Treaty of Versailles, and was quite unprepared to take any steps to enforce it by 1930. On this feeling, which owed so much to the British idea of sportsmanlike conduct toward a beaten opponent, was built the movement for appeasement.

This movement had two basic assumptions: (a) that reparation must be made for Britain's treatment of Germany in 1919 and (b) that if Germany's most obvious demands, such as arms equality, remilitarization of the Rhineland, and perhaps union with Austria, were met, Germany would become satisfied and peaceful.

The trouble with this argument was that once Germany reached this point, it would be very difficult to prevent Germany from going further (such as taking the Sudetenland and the Polish Corridor).

Accordingly, many of the appeasers, when this point was reached in March 1938 went over to the anti-Bolshevik or "three-bloc" point of view, while some even went into the "peace at any price" group.

It is likely that Chamberlain, Sir John Simon, and Sir Samuel Hoare went by this road from appeasement to anti-Bolshevism. At any rate, few influential people were still in the appeasement group by 1939 in the sense that they believed that Germany could ever be satisfied. Once this was realized, it seemed to many that the only solution was to bring Germany into contact with, or even collision with, the Soviet Union.

     The "peace at any price" people were both few and lacking in influence in Britain, while the contrary, as we shall see, was true in France. However, in the period August 1935 to March 1939 and especially in September 1938, the government built upon the fears of this group by steadily exaggerating Germany's armed might and belittling their own, by calculated indiscretions (like the statement in September 1938 that there were no real antiaircraft defenses in London), by constant hammering at the danger of an overwhelming air attack without warning, by building ostentatious and quite useless air-raid trenches in the streets and parks of London, and by insisting through daily warnings that everyone must be fitted with a gas mask immediately (although the danger of a gas attack was nil).

     In this way, the government put London into a panic in 1938 for the first time since 1804 or even 1678. And by this panic, Chamberlain was able to get the British people to accept the destruction of Czechoslovakia, wrapping it up in a piece of paper, marked "peace in our time," which he obtained from Hitler, as he confided to that ruthless dictator, "for British public opinion."

Once this panic passed, Chamberlain found it impossible to get the British public to follow his program, although he himself never wavered, even in 1940. He worked on the appeasement and the "peace at any price" groups throughout 1939, but their numbers dwindled rapidly, and since he could not openly appeal for support on either the anti-Bolshevik or the "three-bloc" basis, he had to adopt the dangerous expedient of pretending to resist (in order to satisfy the British public) while really continuing to make every possible concession to Hitler which would bring Germany to a common frontier with the Soviet Union, all the while putting every pressure on Poland to negotiate and on Germany to refrain from using force in order to gain time to wear Poland down and in order to avoid the necessity of backing up by action his pretense of resistance to Germany. This policy went completely astray in the period from August 1939 to April 1940.

Chamberlain's motives were not bad ones; he wanted peace so that he could devote Britain's "limited resources" to social welfare; but he was narrow and totally ignorant of the realities of power, convinced that international politics could be conducted in terms of secret deals, as business was, and he was quite ruthless in carrying out his aims, especially in his readiness to sacrifice non-English persons, who, in his eyes, did not count...

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