Description
This book is a sequel to Richard Griffiths’s two highly successful previous books on the British pro-Nazi Right, Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany 1933-39 and Patriotism Perverted: Captain Ramsay, the Right Club and British Anti-Semitism 1939-1940. It follows the fortunes of his protagonists after the arrests of May-June 1940, and charts their very varied reactions to the failure of their cause, while also looking at the possible reasons for the Government’s failure to detain prominent pro-Nazis from the higher strata of society.
Some of the pro-Nazis continued with their original views, and even undertook politically subversive activity, here and in Germany. Others, finding that their pre-war balance between patriotism and pro-Nazism had now tipped firmly on the side of patriotism, fully supported the war effort, while still maintaining their old views privately. Other people found that events had made them change their views sincerely. And then there were those who, frightened by the prospect of detention or disgrace, tried to hide or even to deny their former views by a variety of subterfuges, including attacking former colleagues. This wide variety of reactions sheds new light on the equally wide range of reasons for their original admiration for Nazism, and also gives us some more general insight into what could be termed ‘the psychology of failure’.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Part I: Puncturing Myths about the 'Phoney War' Period
1. To fight or not to fight: the myth of Mosley’s patriotism
2. The reception of Bryant’s Unfinished Victory: the myth of public unanimity against Nazi Germany in early 1940
Part II: Peace and War, High-Mindedness and Low Connections: The Duke of Bedford and The Peace Movement
3. Evangelical Anticapitalism: The strange case of the Duke of Bedford
4. ‘How can the Germans be blamed?’ The infiltration of the Peace Movement.
Part III: Defence Regulation 18B, and its After-Effects
5. The watershed: the arrests of May-June 1940 and their aftermath
6. The re-emergence of extreme Right-wing movements in Britain, 1940-45
Part IV: Renegades
7. ‘Long before 1939 I had become an admirer of the Nazi system’: Five British broadcasters for Nazi Germany.
Part V: Pro-Nazism, Patriotism, Hatred, Fear, Remorse: The Extraordinary Variety of Motives among Former 'Fellow-Travellers'
8. ‘Have you found many Lavals among your Galloway friends?’ Wartime and post-war disputes between three ‘Fellow Travellers of the Right’
9. ‘I wrote a very full and strong letter to the King’: Two would-be negotiators.
10. ‘The internment of a person of her social standing might give the public a wrong impression’: the charmed lives of various ‘pillars of society’.
11. ‘His impetuous nature, obstinacy and flawed judgement’: A bull in a china shop.
12. ‘You know the Jew racket as well as I do’: The vagaries of the ‘back-to-the-landers’.
Part VI: Aftermath
13. ‘Change and decay in all around I see’: further post-war decline.
Conclusion
