As with Hitler, we should have seen Putin coming

Telegraph columnists are rightly discouraged from writing articles solely based on an article in our own paper. I am doing so today, however, with the excuse that the article in question appeared a century ago. Indeed, I know about it only because it was reprinted in our “One Hundred Years Ago” column last Friday.

“DISQUIETING REPORTS OF BAVARIAN SITUATION,” said the headline in this newspaper on Saturday January 27, 1923. The sub-head read: “FASCIST REVOLT MENACE.” Germany, the story reported, “is threatened by a complication of the gravest kind.” Following the success of the fascist March on Rome the previous October, “Mussolini’s Teuton counterpart, Adolf Hitler, has decided to … declare ‘war to the knife’” against the Bavarian government.

This news was “of very gloomy omen”: “This Austrian house painter who, during the war, served as a simple soldier in the German army, has in Bavaria a large body of fanatically devoted adherents prepared blindly to do his bidding.” The danger went wider than Bavaria, the reporter added: “It is impossible to say what latent forces might come to the surface in his support in other parts of

Germany were he once to attempt the revolution so often threatened by his disciples.”

The writer then explained how the Nazis (that acronym was not yet used in the British press) had recently filled “six of the chief brewery halls, which are the largest places of public assembly in Munich” for angry meetings. He described Hitler’s National Socialists and their paramilitary activities more fully: they were organised in “storm troops”, “whose field-grey uniforms and Austrian kepis are now a familiar feature in the streets of the Bavarian capital”. On their arms, “they wear a brassard in the black, white and red of the old empire, and with the ‘Swastika’, which in this country is the recognised symbol of anti-semitism”.

Hitler’s aim was to overthrow what he saw as “the traitors of November 1918”, who had forced the German surrender to the Allies. It remained to be seen, the writer concluded, whether the Bavarian government would be “strong enough to suppress this Frankenstein monster”.

In the short term, the Bavarian government did, rather narrowly, prevail. When Hitler attempted his Munich Beer Hall Putsch 10 months after this report, in November 1923, he was arrested, convicted and imprisoned for treason. In prison, he wrote Mein Kampf, where, with appalling frankness, he set out his ideas and aims. Roughly 10 years later, he became chancellor of Germany. The “latent forces” had won.

Nothing in the Telegraph report was completely new. The readers would already have heard something of Hitler. But I find it striking and impressive how fully, at such an early stage, the paper’s unnamed correspondent grasped the elements of the man and his mission – his mesmerising qualities and propaganda skills, his bitterness about the war, his propensity towards violence and his racism. He also understood why, in febrile, defeated Germany, Hitler was so dangerous to the whole nation.

This should give some answer to those who still maintain that it was not possible to discern Hitler’s aggressive and destructive intent until he invaded Poland 16 years later. I have never fully studied British newspapers in the inter-war years, but I believe it to be the case that the only two mainstream titles that were consistent in their warnings against appeasing Hitler were the liberal News Chronicle and the conservative Daily Telegraph.

In the 1930s, it took most of the West a dreadfully long time to face a fairly obvious truth. Our slowness has been replicated this century in our reluctance to face what Vladimir Putin was up to, which became pretty clear from 2008.

After writing about the state of the police last Saturday, I received an interesting email. In January 1960, its author, David Cooper, informs me, he turned up at the Met’s recruitment centre in Borough High Street, London SE1, along with 44 other 16 and 17-year-olds hoping to become police cadets. The men had already made written applications and undergone close background checks.

At 9am, the candidates sat a written exam in maths and English. Then they were taken to St Thomas’s Hospital for eye tests: “No specs or colour blindness were allowed in those days.” Candidates were then interviewed individually by three senior police officers. By 5pm, it was over. Of the 45, 11 were accepted as cadets. Mr Cooper (Warrant number 151119) was one of them. Among those rejected: “There were lots of tears.”

Nowadays, the process is strikingly different. In some cases, police recruits are accepted without any in-person interview at all. The written English test has been made less demanding – a dangerous decision in an age when accurate written communications are made more necessary than ever by technology and the rigorous demands of evidence.

Privately, senior police officers admit there are issues with standards. They never deliberately go below a certain line, they say, but, with 9,500 new officers recruited to the Met in the past three-and-a-half years, they get close to it.

It is also a problem that, in recent years, the measure of success has been increasing the number of ethnicminority recruits. This is particularly encouraged by Sadiq Khan’s City Hall. If the main preoccupations of recruiters are quantity and diversity – not enough attention is paid to quality.