Ireland was politically divided in May 1921 subsequently becoming a Republic and a separate entity, Northern Ireland. Both territories have had fleeting experiences of indigenous fascism since the 1920s. My previous piece on archaeologist Adolph Mahr demonstrated how the Irish state (apparently unwittingly) promoted Mahr to the directorship of its National museum in 1934. He was a man who was by any definition, “a Nazi living in plain sight.” This article demonstrates that bizarrely, an anchor of the British state in Northern Ireland, Lord Londonderry, was at the least, grossly misled by Hitler and his cronies. Londonderry’s connections with the Nazi regime were subsequently ignored by historians. However, at the time, his apparent collusion with Fascism did not go unnoticed on his Mountstuart estate, where he contributed to ambiguity in popular attitudes to Germany. Londonderry’s crude interventions about Nazism alarmed Belfast’s Jewish community.
It should be noted, from the outset, that fascism in Northern Ireland had a notable inter-war presence, with groups like Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF). They spawned the Ulster Fascists, attracting loyalists with antisemitism and anti-independence messages. The Ulster Fascists were an autonomous wing of Mosley’s BUF who actually opposed partition. Later, the National Front gained loyalist sympathy, also exploiting territorial flags. Meanwhile, in Southern Ireland, in the 1930s and 1940s, the Blueshirts (Army Comrades Association) and Ailtirí na hAiséirghe (Architects of the Resurrection) adopted fascist policies and even paraded in uniform. More recently, far-right protests and anti-immigrant actions have been described as having fascist-like characteristics. They invoked fascistic elements (e.g. weaponizing respective flags) on both sides of the border. There was widespread alarm among the small Jewish communities dotted across Ireland.
These events, however, have attracted more scholarly attention than Lord Londonderry’s communications with the Nazi regime, which led him to be dubbed “Herr Londonderry.” A British aristocrat and former Air Minister, he certainly had significant, misguided, links with Nazi Germany. His correspondence brims with references to personal friendships with the German leadership at a time of advancing Nazism. It is difficult not to infer that he either did not find them repugnant or he felt there was no other way but to seek to placate them. He famously interacted with the entire Nazi hierarchy. Londonderry strongly backed appeasement, at a time when Cabinet struggled to muster political clout to oppose Nazism. Historians have subsequently been kind in presenting Londonderry as a naive figure. In fact, his overtly pro-German leanings were exploited by Nazis to legitimize their regime. A close-reading of the person-to-person letters with German high rankers suggests he either accepts the authenticity of Nazism or plays along because he is torturously frightened of them.
Recent studies such as Kershaw and Fleming, among others, have shed fresh light on Londonderry’s apparently bizarre “comfort level” with Fascism. The bulk of Londonderry’s papers are divided between the public records agency PRONI and archives in Derry, Durham, and Ireland. Examining them, Londonderry appears to understood and did not have an antipathy towards fascism. Alternatively, he may have believed Hitler was so invincible the only possibility was appeasement and that gentlemanly dialogue might rescue Britain.
In short, we could not conclude that Londonderry was an ideological Nazi. He was known to display the infamous Dachau military porcelain, but he was far from being a Swastika-bearing ideologue. It is probably rather than during a crucial time in world history he saw no realistic Plan B. Like statemen of the time, he believed “big politics” involved dialogue with dictators. Londonderry enthusiastically cultivated friendships with high-ranking Nazis like Joachim von Ribbentrop. In 1936 he visited Germany, had a two-hour meeting with Hitler and praised the Nazi regime, inviting Ribbentrop to his estate. He backed the notorious Anglo-German Fellowship, promoting dialogue and understanding with Nazi Germany among British elites. He failed to grasp the violent, expansionist nature of Hitler’s true aims, viewing Germany as a wronged nation. His efforts made it hard for parliamentarians to gain enough traction to refuse “appeasement” and inadvertently aided Nazi propaganda. Ironically, Winston Churchill, was a cousin of Londonderry.
Londonderry praised leading Nazis like Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess and Hitler himself. Indeed, after his initial visit to Germany in early 1936, Londonderry made himself one of the most prominent advocates of appeasement. Owing to his unique rapport with senior ministers in London and Berlin, he could circumvent the “diplomacy vacuum” between the two states. A second meeting with Hitler in October 1936 reawakened forces for all-out British appeasement. Following his visit to Göring, Londonderry met with Prime Minister Chamberlain. In 1938 he wrote Ourselves and Germany, on Nazi grievances. Implicitly antisemitic, Londonderry believed “under gentleman’s rules” wealthy Jews would be safe whatever catastrophe happened. The impression left by his papers in these crucial years, is of an amateur diplomat who grossly over-rated his own importance.
More seriously, Londonderry was incapable of contemplating the horror of what Hitler and his cronies had in mind for Europe. Chamberlain flew to Germany for a meeting with Hitler at Berchtesgaden in September 1938. Eventually the conference between the four powers convened at Munich on 29 September. Londonderry was in Munich but was not offered part in the proceedings. The Munich agreement gave Hitler the Sudeten territories and guaranteed the remainder of Czechoslovakia through the compliance of France and Italy. Chamberlain persuaded Hitler to sign the infamous, useless letter declaring their intention never to go to war. As Churchill informed Londonderry, ‘Your policy is certainly being tried’. This was probably the most disastrous oversight noticeable in Londonderry’s papers, as it was obvious he thought war was averted and Europe would get back to normal.
Londonderry naïvely continued to involve himself in a situation he felt was peace-making but was relentlessly heading towards war. His papers show he resumed dialogue with Göring, and with the former chancellor of Germany and fellow aristocrat Franz von Papen. Londonderry also appealed to the German ambassador to London to save UK–German relations by denying press reports about Nazi brutality. The ambassador offered no reply but Londonderry issued a renewed call for a peace settlement in a letter to The Times on 22 June 1939. He was not only an appeaser but his conciliation was based on fundamental misunderstanding of the realpolitik of the Nazi regime. His interventions likely delayed all-out war, by some happenchance, but they also stymied Europe’s preparedness to face Hitler.
His papers also show a mental or conceptual juxtaposition in Lord Londonderry’s capacity to differentiate between bad Germans (i.e. Nazis) from Germany as a whole. It is possible that he lacked such genuine grasp of international relations that he did not realise there were no “good guys” left. He huddled together with Philip Conwell-Evans the ex-appeaser who had forged links with German opposition groups, the supposedly ‘moderate’ Colonel Schwerin in the German general staff, and almost anyone who would listen to his high-minded call for a “gentlemanly-peace”.
From his personal letters it is clear that Londonderry genuinely believed he ‘represented the spirit of the British government and people in being determined to resist any further aggression’. It never occurred to him that Hitler’s deceptive style left his guests with the impression that they mattered. When the Nazis concluded a pact with Stalin in August, Londonderry could not even then realise his own folly. Instead of self-reflection and realising that he had been totally misled by the boundless aspiration of Nazism, he blamed Chamberlain and Halifax. He began to write that the British government had allowed this development of pact with the Russians to happen by delay.
Predictably the Londonderry family then faced national disgrace, although allegations that the whole family were pro-Nazi were muted. Prior to the declaration of war on 3 September 1939, the Londonderry moved back to their Northern Ireland estate, Mount Stewart. There were even rumours that they were Nazi agents or that they might have to be interned by the government, which would have been such a disgrace it could scarcely have been borne by the country’s aristocracy- at least half of whom possessed German relatives.
There are hints in his papers that even in the early 1940s Londonderry had hopes of a ‘peace party’ to negotiate with Hitler. He remained concerned about Soviet expansion and in face of the horror materialising across Europe, retained sympathy with German grievances. He was on a list of names carried by Hess on his flight to Scotland in September 1940. At this stage he advocated Chamberlain’s replacement with Churchill and threw his energy in favour of the war effort. After 1940 he was a national disgrace, although there was such a protective culture around the family, they suffered no retribution when the worst horrors of Hitler’s Germany were discovered. Even during the Nurnberg Tribunal, he offered a character reference for Ribbentrop. Perhaps he was less a Nazi-apologist than a British nationalist who thought entitled-statemen could still steer history better than elected politicians.
Further Reading on E-International Relations
