A starry-eyed visit to Nazi Germany
In 1936, the MP and diarist Henry “Chips” Channon visited the Olympics in Berlin. At the time, fear of Bolshevism and naivety about
Hitler meant that, like many in Britain’s ruling classes, he admired the Nazis – as a new, uncensored edition of his diaries reveals
5 August 1936
Up this morning betimes, as Pepys puts it, and at eight o’clock, Honor [Guinness, Channon’s wife], Harold Balfour and I took off for Berlin.
6 August
In a grand car with a Storm Trooper at the wheel, we whizzed off to the Olympic Stadium... after an hour or so of watching boring sports there was some commotion, and we were told that perhaps Hitler might be coming.
Suddenly the crowd [was] shouting and bellowed “Heil” at a large, gay, rotund figure dressed in a white uniform that appeared. It was the famous, fantastic Göring. He waved a greeting and sat down in the front of the box. Presently the crowds roared again, and the amplifiers called out “We want our Hermann.” Göring smiled, rose and bowed and sat down again, as we did and the games proceeded.
Whenever there was a win, or a victory, the entire stadium stood up, and with right arm uplifted, sang the national anthem of the victorious country. German wins were the most perfect, and first
Deutschland über alles was bellowed, followed immediately by Horst Wessel, the Nazi anthem. It had a gay lilt. An hour or so passed and then the audience was electrified – Hitler was coming! He looks exactly like his caricatures, brown uniform, short Charlie Chaplin moustache, and square, stocky figure, determined but not grim. He saluted the cheering thousands and sat down. One felt one was in the presence of some semi-divine creature: I was more thrilled than when I met Mussolini in Perugia, more stimulated than when I was blessed by the Pope.
At eight o’clock, driving in our Rolls-Royce piloted by a smart Storm Trooper in his khaki shirt, we arrived at the Opera House for the state banquet. It was magnificent. We were in evening dress and Honor in full regalia with rubies, but minus tiara. One felt the effort to show the world the grandeur, the permanency, the respectability of the new regime. Prince Philipp of Hesse came down to our table and said that Göring would like to meet us. Honor and I were led up to his box and presented. He was flirtatious, gay... a more charming [Viscount] Castlerosse. He exchanged banter with Honor and presented her with a porcelain bell, a model of the Olympic bell.
A breathless, unforgettable evening. Certainly the Olympic
Games, as they were intended, have made Berlin the rallying point, if only for a fortnight, of the grand and the chic of the Earth.
8 August
I walked about Berlin and passed Hitler’s house in the Wilhelmstrasse. No one is allowed to walk unescorted in front of it; sentries or parading guards motion one to cross the street, where there is always a crowd waiting in the hope of seeing the Führer.
We raced back to Berlin to dine with the Horstmanns. Countess Welczeck, who is Spanish, but the wife of the German ambassador to Paris told me appalling stories of the daily outrages in Spain: the communists have stopped nuns before setting them alight with petrol. They have torn the emblems of Christ from crucifixes and substituted in His place live priests and monks. And the civilised world allows such infamy to go unpunished and dines out! That Germany, too, is not now communist is due to Hitler. It is thanks to him that these games go on, that these fêtes take place. Oh! England wake up. You in your sloth and conceit are ignorant of the Soviet dangers and will not realise that. Germany is fighting our battles.
10 August
A Colonel Somebody fetched us and drove us to the country to inspect a labour camp. We had been told such tales of the hardships labour camps entailed, etc. Not at all: the camps looked tidy, even gay, and the boys, all about 18, looked like the ordinary German peasant boy, fair, healthy and sunburned. They are taught the preliminary military drills, gardening, etc., and their health and strength are built up. They were all smiling and clean, and we saw the men’s room, dormitories, baths, etc. As we left the guard was changed over, four boys carrying spades took the place of four other boys. For six months they live there and all classes are mixed, which is an excellent system, its purpose is to wipe out class feeling, which has become practically non-existent in Germany. England could learn many a lesson from Nazi Germany. I cannot understand the English dislike and suspicion of the Nazi regime. Personally I believe, and it rends my heart to say so, that England is in the retrograde; something of the old spirit is withering, and what is coming in its place is not exactly pleasant. I hope that I am not in at the kill.
11 August
Berlin has become oppressive, the great heat, crowds, swastika
“England could learn many a lesson from Nazi Germany. I cannot understand the English dislike and suspicion of the Nazi regime”
banners blowing in the breeze, the amplifiers roaring “Achtung”. Harold Balfour and I took our car and drove to a large and deserted lake in the opposite direction of Potsdam. What a country. It stirs me so sharply, and I wonder why? Is it reaction against my mother’s mad Francophilia? There are other reasons for my preference for Teutonic races: I loathe Latins, and Slavs are too Bolshevist. There is a common blood affinity between us and the Germans and Austrians. I like their lusty warm-blooded love of country, children, dogs, power – and a thousand other reasons.
The Ribbentrops’ party of tonight made history, the splendour, the seating arrangements lend dignity to the new regime and the presence of the Kaiser’s son, his daughter of Brunswick, etc. flatter the Nazi susceptibilities... A dazzling evening. Göring shook us both by the hand and his merry eyes twinkled. He seems a loveably disarming man. There were many MPs present, [Kenneth] Lindsay, Civil Lord of the Admiralty, suggests the formation of a Friends of Germany [group], in the H of C to meet and offset the Francomaniacs, who are so dangerous to the peace of Europe.
12 August
We lunched today with the Horstmanns in their v elegant, very civilised house. The Horstmann position is unique, they are both extremely rich and she, although a cousin of Emerald Cunard’s, is half Jewess. The Hitler regime, however, has nevertheless scrupulously refrained from persecuting the Horstmanns or in any way making them uncomfortable. [Their] salon is the centre of Berlin’s fashionable and cosmopolitan life, but while the gay, the rich, the aristocratic still frolic chez the Horstmanns, no Nazis brown their doors, no policy is decided at their hospitable board, no appointments are made in their dix-huitième rooms...
This afternoon George Wussow took Honor and me in a fast car for a long drive along the Hitlerstrasse, the magnificent new road which will one day lead from the Baltic to the Adriatic. We drove at breakneck speed out to a fantastic water lift, a gigantic bit of engineering. It lifts three boats, full of people, ninety-six feet from the river to the canal. A race which can do that, can make everything.
A crowd watched us assemble at the [Hotel] Bristol. Were they pleased, or sulky, at well-dressed “elegants” going into dinner? Did they think it a return of the old regime? Berlin is still v crowded, gay and pulsating with life. Everyone goes to the Olympic Games all day: we pretend to and don’t as they are v boring, except for the arrival of Hitler.
13 August
Berlin waxes on: [the] Göring ball. I don’t know how to describe this dazzling crowded function. We drove to the Ministerium, where he lives in the very centre of Berlin. [We] found the great gardens lit up, and 700 or 800 guests gaped at the display and the splendour. Towards the end of the meal, a whole corps de ballet danced in the moonlight. The end of the garden was in darkness, and suddenly, with no warning, it became floodlit and a procession of white horses, donkeys, peasants, music[ians] appeared from nowhere and we were led into a Luna Park especially and secretly built! It was fantastic, peasants dancing, vast women carrying pretzels and beer, a ship, crowds of gay, laughing people, animals. Reinhardt could not have done better.
“At the end of dinner cannons roared and fireworks began on a scale that would have
staggered the Romans”
The music roared, the staggered guests wandered about dazed by such lavish hospitality. “There has never been anything like this since the days of Louis Quatorze,” Mme de Castellane remarked,
“Not since Nero,” I retorted, but actually it was more like the fêtes of Claudius with the cruelty left out... and at what painstaking trouble and expense must this party have been arranged. People whispered that Goebbels was in despair, dark, semi-sinister Goebbels who looks like Mr Attlee and is the éminence grise of the regime.
Frau Göring asked if we would like to see the house, and eagerly we followed her indoors into the vast Ministerium, where the Görings live in theatrical magnificence. The rooms are all large and nearly empty, unimpressive, except for their size. Alone Göring’s study is interesting, his writing table with its collection of telephones and many outsize photographs. Everything on the table is like Göring himself, too large, ostentatious and rather disarming. Behind his chair from which he directs the affairs of Prussia is a long bookshelf holding a collection of photographs, all in silver frames, the like of which I have never seen before, not even in Mrs Vanderbilt’s famous photograph gallery. There are Hitler, Mussolini, and every royalty almost in Europe. Göring likes royalties and they like him. There is something un-Christian about Göring, a touch of the arena, a strong pagan streak, I suspect him of being venal, not least lascivious mentally, but perhaps, like many who are libidinous-minded, like myself, he does little. Yet it is not difficult to picture him in here, garlanded, and dancing before boys with a harp in his hand. People say that he can be v hard and ruthless, as are all Nazis when occasion demands, but intimately he seems all vanity and with a childish love of display.
15 August
This evening was the Goebbels’s party, the last of the fantastic entertainments, and in a way the most impressive. There were 2,000 people invited, and we drove out in a queue of cars, all excellently controlled by the police. [A] bridge of pontoons had been thrown across the waters to an island, a former Imperial possession. The arrangements were colossal; we passed over the bridge along a path lined on either side by young [ illegible] in gay uniforms, service uniforms. We were received by Goebbels, dark, intelligent, and slightly sinister.
At the end of dinner cannons roared and fireworks began on a scale that would have staggered the Romans. For half an hour the German heavens blazed with coloured lights; the noise, too, was impressive and frightening, and when the fireworks were over at long last, the skies were still light for some little time until darkness dared defy Goebbels and steal back again.
16 August
The orchestra played, Hitler rose, the great torch faded out, the crowd 140,000 strong sang Deutschland über alles, with arms uplifted. There was a shout, a speech or two, night fell, and the Olympic Games, the great German display of power and bid for recognition, was over. Mankind has never staged anything so terrific, or so impressive. And I couldn’t help thinking, as Hitler, alone, supreme, took the salute in the great arena, of the Emperor Claudius and his cruel games. Was it possible, would the little man from Braunau, for all his genius, remain simple and unspoilt whilst the world and its kings feared and fawned upon him?
This is an edited extract from Henry “Chips” Channon: The
Diaries (Vol. 1): 1918-38, edited by Simon Heffer (Hutchinson £35). © Georgia Fanshawe, Henry Channon and Robin Howard as the Trustees of the diaries and personal papers of Sir Henry Channon 2021. Introduction and notes © Simon Heffer 2021.