Britain's aristocratic Nazi sympathisers.

 

Fascist sympathiser - Lady Austen Chamberlain

My mother once told me that Churchill was considered a 'warmonger' by many British people before the country declared war on Germany in 1939, after the invasion of Poland. The House of Lords was packed with Nazi appeasers and sympathisers. The Duke of Windsor and his American wife, were both Nazi sympathisers. Lady Austen Chamberlain, was also a fascist sympathiser, who greatly admired Benito Mussolini. Dianna and Unity Mitford, the daughters of Lord Redesdale, were both Nazi sympathisers who knew Hitler, personally.

Churchill had visited Italy in 1927 and had called Mussolini the "Roman genius." Churchill told them that if he'd been an Italian, he would have been a fascist and said that Italy had done the world a favour by getting rid of Bolshevism in Italy.

Many of these aristocrats saw Nazi Germany as a bulwark against Bolshevism and they knew that Hitler was on the side of the dividend drawer. Stalin had offered the British and French a non-aggression pact before the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of August 1939. The French wanted to enter into a pact with the Soviet Union but were persuaded by the British not to do so.

I think Neville Chamberlain and many in the British establishment were happy to see Germany rearm and wanted to see Germany dragged into a war with Russia because Hitler would then keep his hands off the British Empire. They may have been surprised by the pact with Russia but they knew that Hitler had got his eye on Russia.

We should not forget that the treatment of German Jews and the mass murder of Jewish people in Europe was never a casus belli, for Britain going to war with Germany, nor was it used as propaganda against Germany. Most British people weren't aware of the concentration camps until the allies invaded Germany. This was later used as justification for the war.

Had it not been for Winston Churchill, it's likely that the British establishment would have sought terms with Nazi Germany, but Churchill was opposed to this. The Conservative politician, Enoch Powell, thought that the British ruling class were rather like the Athenian oligarchs who put their own direct class interests before the cultural and general interests of their own city state.

I know that General Franco wrote to Neville Chamberlain thanking him for his support during the Spanish Civil War even though Britain, was supposed to be neutral. There was a lot of British investment in Spain and the British ruling class identified their class interests with those of the wealthy Spanish landowners and Franco's nationalists, who we supplied with equipment. Those volunteers that fought on the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), knew that they had to oppose fascism because they knew that a victory by Franco, who was supported by Germany and Italy, would lead to a much bigger European conflict, which is what happened. Those International Brigade volunteers like James Keogh, a working-class young man from Wellington Street, in Ashton-under-Lyne, in Lancashire, who fought in Spain, had more foresight than the British ruling class.