Interviewing Hitler

Norman Ebbutt​ , Berlin correspondent for the Times, interviewed Hitler on 14 October 1930, soon after the Nazis had their first big breakthrough in the Reichstag elections. They met in a small, musty room ‘in a third or fourth-class hotel in a very grubby street’, which at the time was the Nazis’ advance headquarters in the capital. ‘I was led upstairs into a tiny bedroom’ with a rumpled bed, where Hitler was waiting for him. He ranted at Ebbutt for forty minutes, speaking calmly at first, then hysterically, as Ebbutt tried in vain to ask a question. ‘He strikes one not at all as the pale, slender, visionary of certain widely distributed photographs,’ Ebbutt wrote, ‘but rather as an ex-sergeant major with the gift of the gab, and a faraway look in his eyes.’ The purpose of the interview, from the Nazis’ point of view, was to offer Hitler the opportunity to deny that National Socialists had smashed in the windows of Jewish shops in central Berlin the night before. Ebbutt had seen police reports showing that 100 out of 108 of those arrested were Nazi Party members or sympathisers, so he knew Hitler was lying.

Ebbutt was contemptuous but wary of Hitler, taking him seriously far sooner than other foreign correspondents and diplomats in Berlin. On three occasions in 1930 he attempted to persuade the Times to let him write an article on the rise of the Nazis, but was turned down. According to Walter Duranty of the New York Times, who called Ebbutt ‘the best newspaperman I ever met’, he had said two years earlier, in the summer of 1928, that everybody was underestimating Hitler and the National Socialists. Ebbutt believed that they would absorb the other far-right nationalist parties because the Nazis ‘know what they want and have a concrete programme, which is more than the others can claim. I think Hitler is going places.’ If the flood of American money invested in Germany ceased, he wrote, ‘you will see a sudden slump here and general unemployment. That will be Hitler’s chance.’

When Hitler did seize his chance, becoming chancellor on 30 January 1933, Ebbutt immediately saw it as the beginning of a radical counter-revolution. Nazi behaviour ‘had quite a lot of fascism [on the Italian model] in it,’ he wrote, ‘but – the Germans being German – it had a lot more deliberate bloodshed and sadism, particularly more efficiency.’ He had a clear-eyed but grim understanding of what the Nazi seizure of power meant for the rest of Europe. In a long piece on 11 April, he wrote that whatever Hitler might say about wanting peace, it was entirely conditional on Germany getting back ‘most of what she lost through the war of 1914-18’. While Hitler was speaking about peace, Hermann Göring, then Reich commissioner for aviation, was saying publicly that Germans ‘must be ready to redeem with blood a pledge written in blood’. Ebbutt concluded that ‘in influential and reasonable circles [in Berlin], the view may be heard that war, especially in continental Europe, is a natural, almost inevitable thing, and that next time Germany has every expectation of having the means to win and every intention of winning.’ He predicted that war might begin in ‘five or six years’: that is, in 1938 or 1939 – not a bad prediction.

He also had a number of scoops. On 15 February, he published a secret order by Göring instructing Nazi stormtroopers to take over policing: this, he wrote, was ‘the first unmistakable step towards the establishment by the Nazis of a fascist regime in Germany’. Together with his deputy correspondent, Douglas Reed, he had another scoop not long after, which combined an examination of Göring’s belligerent rhetoric about airpower with a picture Reed had spotted in a German magazine showing officers in ‘the German Air Sports Federation’ wearing military-style uniforms and carrying revolvers. They concluded that here was ‘the nucleus of a future air force’, what would become the Luftwaffe. It’s worth comparing what Ebbutt was writing in the days after Hitler took power with what was appearing in other newspapers at the time. On 31 January, for instance, the New York Times told its readers that Hitler was likely to be stymied by the opposition ‘if he sought to translate the wild and whirling words of his campaign speeches into political action’.

Even before they took over, the Nazis had made clumsy efforts to get the Times to replace Ebbutt as its correspondent by suggesting to Lady Astor, whose family owned the paper, that he was a drunk. In power, they switched to more direct methods. Returning home from a restaurant late one night, Ebbutt saw armed police running into the building with rifles at the ready; moments later ‘the windows of my flat lit up.’ He thought the police were just trying to frighten him, but the raid took place a few days after the Reichstag fire on 27 February 1933, when anybody the Nazis disliked was at risk of being detained or disappearing permanently – even if, as Ebbutt recognised, a foreigner was much safer than a German.

In the period that followed, Ebbutt interviewed several people who had suffered terrible beatings in the basements of Nazi safehouses ‘a quarter of a mile from my office … They began usually by knocking out the teeth or most of them with savage blows. Then they beat their victims with rubber truncheons and/or steel rods until they were unconscious.’ He kept a stiff upper lip among fellow foreign correspondents, but when he visited his daughter, Ann, at school in England in 1936, she found him ‘particularly upset because he had just interviewed a survivor from a concentration camp [probably Dachau], a communist who had been so badly tortured that he was in a wheelchair’. In Berlin the following summer, she went riding in the Grunewald forest park: ‘I enjoyed it until the press campaign started against Dad, when the Englishwoman married to a German who owned the riding stable refused to have us anymore.’

Harassed by the regime, he was also having increasing problems in getting pieces critical of the Nazis into the Times, which was taking a more vigorous pro-appeasement line. Articles of the kind he had written about the regime in 1933 were less and less welcome in Printing House Square. Geoffrey Dawson, editor of the paper between 1923 and 1941, wrote to Ebbutt on 1 April 1934, praising him for the good job he was doing and saying that he fully agreed with Ebbutt’s diagnosis of the situation in Germany. But then he gave his own view of what was happening. ‘There will be plenty of British sympathy with Hitler if he manifestly sticks to the line of helping a genuine renaissance of the youth of Germany,’ Dawson wrote. ‘It is the greatest possible mistake to suppose that average British opinion has swung clean away from him in the last year.’

At no point does Dawson tell Ebbutt what to write, but his letter leaves no doubt that the editorial viewpoint of the Times had become more positive about Hitler. Ebbutt later wrote that ‘the very few Englishmen’ in Germany who were warning about what was going to happen ‘were gradually edged out by the highest bigwigs in Great Britain, who had convinced themselves that they knew more than the man on the spot’. In what he wrote for print he didn’t criticise the Times except by implication, but in conversation he was much more forthright. William Shirer, an American correspondent in Berlin, wrote in his diary that Ebbutt ‘complained to me in private that the Times does not print all he sends, that it does not want to hear too much about the bad side of Nazi Germany, and apparently has been captured by the pro-Nazis in London. He is discouraged and talks of quitting.’

By 1937, the Germans were putting a great deal of pressure on him, too. Joseph Goebbels wrote in his diary that Ebbutt was ‘a real German-hater and an enemy of National Socialism’. A second attempt was made to get the Times to replace him, with a German diplomat telling the Foreign Office that Ebbutt was ‘not making any real effort to present the National-Socialist regime in its most favourable light’. A crude Goebbels-inspired campaign in the German press made play of the fact that the Times spelled backwards was ‘Semit’, supposedly a sign that it was a Jewish-Marxist organisation.

In August that year, three German journalists were expelled from Britain for suspected espionage. Retaliation was a legitimate reason to get rid of Ebbutt, and he was served his expulsion order by the German police. He left Berlin for the last time on the evening of 21 August, seen off from Charlottenburg station by fifty foreign correspondents: ‘Norman Ebbutt of the London Times, by far the best correspondent here, left this evening,’ Shirer wrote in his diary.

He was expelled, following British action in kicking out two or three Nazi correspondents in London, the Nazis seizing the opportunity to get rid of a man they have hated and feared for years because of his exhaustive knowledge of this country and what was going on behind the scenes. The Times, which has played along with the pro-Nazi Cliveden set, never gave him much support and published only half of what he wrote.

The impact Ebbutt had had became clear soon after his departure. Goebbels gave him a back-handed compliment by writing that he had no complaint about the British correspondents in Berlin ‘since Mr Ebbutt of the Times has gone’. The pro-appeasement British ambassador, Nevile Henderson, said he was no longer worried by the British press corps: ‘Except for Ebbutt, who is now gone, they don’t seek to make mischief.’ At a meeting with Henderson, Goebbels was pleased to find that they agreed about the failings of the British press: ‘He regrets the press dirt which has arisen over the expulsion of Ebbutt.’ (Henderson did not take to Goebbels, who reminded him of ‘a typical little Irish agitator’. He suspected that Goebbels had Celtic origins.)

A previous editor of the Times, Henry Wickham Steed, who had been a foreign correspondent in Vienna before the First World War, wrote soon after Ebbutt’s expulsion that ‘only those who have worked under similar conditions can understand how severe is the strain of living in a hostile atmosphere while observing events.’ The journalist under threat has to write in a way that does not give an excuse to ‘vigilant and ill-disposed authorities’ to silence them. He cited the work of Ebbutt in Berlin as one of the greatest performances of this journalistic balancing act, keeping ‘that part of the British public, which had eyes to read and minds to understand, aware of what was going on in Germany’.

Ebbutt had returned home unwell. ‘Before being expelled,’ he later wrote,

I had had warnings of my state of health, but not, until afterwards looking back, of the catastrophe which befell upon me. I was very tired, and after a week in London to tell the story of my expulsion to various officials and the Times, I faded away slowly to a little town by the sea in Kent for a much needed rest. A month afterwards I had a cerebral thrombosis – a stroke to the majority. When I regained consciousness and knew I was not to die, I began to count my handicaps. I was paralysed on my right side from face to toe. I was completely dumb, though my ability to read was not affected either in English or German.

Completely paralysed at first, he learned to walk unsteadily with an iron on one leg after eight months, but ‘the power of speech came back very slowly. The words had to be learned again almost like a child. The power of writing came back to me a little, but only a little, faster.’ He lived for another 31 years, nursed by his second wife, Gladys, dying at the age of 74 in 1968. His son, Keith, saw him once or twice a year: ‘He communicated by answering yes or no to my questions (with help from G), and got very frustrated and upset when I could not understand what he was trying to say.’

Frustrating also for Ebbutt must have been the knowledge that journalists, politicians and academics whose experience of Weimar and Nazi Germany was far inferior to his own were soon writing well-received books about this crucial period in German and European history. They often gave him high praise as the journalist whose take on Hitler and the Nazis had proved entirely correct. But references to Ebbutt for the most part narrowly focused on him as a hero of the anti-appeasers, who had been disgracefully mistreated by the pro-appeasement Dawson and the Times. Ebbutt was one of the few protagonists in the great controversy over appeasement, which raged for decades, who did not write a book about it. Gradually, he was forgotten, and he and Gladys had trouble living on his inadequate pension from the Times. Their financial situation only improved when, much to Ebbutt’s surprise, he was awarded a second pension by the postwar German government, which recognised that his disabilities were partly a consequence of Nazi rule.

Iknew something​ about Ebbutt because in 1927 he had given my father, Claud Cockburn, his first job in journalism, in the Times’s office in Berlin, and had promoted his career on the paper. Claud liked him immensely and held his professional skills in high regard. I felt it to be a horrible piece of ill-luck that, having survived the 1930s in Berlin, Ebbutt had been so badly crippled and was scarcely able to communicate for the rest of his life.

Yet it turns out that Ebbutt hadn’t been as totally silenced as I imagined. After I published a biography of my father last year, Ebbutt’s granddaughter, Sheila Ebbutt, made contact.* She told me that, as a child, she ‘could not understand his grunting attempts at speech’, but that after seven or eight years he had ‘gradually learned to type with his left hand and started writing a memoir’. She had ten chapters of it, in which ‘he talks about his meetings with Hitler, Göring, Goebbels and others.’ She sent me the typescript along with two brief but revealing accounts by the children from his first marriage, Keith, who doesn’t seem to have liked his father much, and Ann, who was more sympathetic.

The typescript, with the provisional title ‘My Twelve Years in Germany’, seems to have been written between about 1944 and 1946 and gives an account of the last days of Weimar and the first years of Nazi rule. His detestation of the Nazis is clear but, he explains, ‘it was not, in 1933, a policy’ – his policy – to show ‘100 per cent hatred of them’. Had he done so, ‘I should have been promptly withdrawn by the Times to England, and sent to another country, and I should have deserved it.’

Ebbutt begins with a résumé of his life before he moved to Berlin. Born in 1894, the son of a journalist, he left school in 1909 at the age of fifteen (after suffering ‘a nervous breakdown’, according to Keith). He spent six months in Germany in 1910: ‘I was only sixteen – a ridiculous age to teach at a school of languages. Only my apparent age, which was then four or five years in advance of my real age, got me the job.’ Good at languages, he became assistant correspondent for the Daily News in Paris at seventeen, and travelled to Finland and Russia. He returned to England and joined the Times as a subeditor two days before war broke out. After spending it uneventfully as a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, he went back to the Times in 1919 as a subeditor in the Foreign Room. From here he was sent as assistant correspondent to Berlin in 1925.

He believed that the great mistake of the Allies was not ‘to have marched into Berlin’ in 1918 to secure Germany’s unconditional surrender. The so-called German Revolution that year got rid of the Kaiser, but otherwise ‘did not do very much to the Junkers and middle classes except frighten them a bit’. Above all, the army remained an independent and decisive force in German politics. Political leaders, notably the foreign minister, Gustav Stresemann, were eager to cultivate good relations with Britain in order to loosen the restrictions placed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles. Ebbutt, consequently, was given excellent access to the Weimar political elite. He became a friend of Heinrich Brüning, chancellor between 1930 and 1932, whom he considered the last chance for German democracy.

‘Norman Ebbutt was intelligent and courageous,’ my father wrote of him during his Weimar years. ‘Politically, he was, I suppose, what could be described as a left-wing liberal, which meant, at any rate in his case, that he hoped for the best in everyone.’ There is a touch of gentle sarcasm here, but Ebbutt’s guarded optimism was never naive. He believed he had sure instincts about what made Germany tick. But the benefits of his long years in Germany were more concrete than that. He left his files in Berlin when he was expelled, but he did bring out two pocket diaries containing the names of his German contacts, their identities so heavily disguised – ‘all secret names were deliberately not the initials of the man in question’ – that he himself could no longer decode them seven or eight years later. These contacts meant that Ebbutt was uniquely well informed about Nazi actions. Such connections can only be made slowly over the years and this is near impossible once a viciously authoritarian regime is firmly in power. Potential informants will think it too risky to reveal secrets – and under such governments everything is a secret – to a foreign journalist, unless they have known and trusted them for a long time. Ebbutt had established relationships with his sources long before the Nazis took power and he knew how to use them.

‘Göring never forgave me,’ Ebbutt wrote after his revelation about the rebirth of German military airpower. He thought all the Nazi leaders were violent thugs, though he believed Goebbels, a ‘past master of propaganda’, to be ‘far more subtle than Göring or even Hitler in most matters’ and found interviewing him to be largely useless because he lied consistently. He interviewed Hitler a second time, but learned nothing new. He found it much more useful to speak to Hitler’s SS bodyguards about ‘the war with the Reds and – always a winner – the insignia of Nazi uniforms’.

Ebbutt was careful to avoid any factual mistakes that might give the Nazis an excuse to expel him, and avoided subjects that were overtly provocative. He wrote extensively about the persecution of Protestant churches, which showed up the totalitarian nature of the regime, but it wasn’t an issue Hitler cared much about. Ebbutt’s source – they had been introduced by Chancellor Brüning – was Horst Michael, a historian who mixed with Protestant leaders and wanted the world to know what was happening in Germany. Michael informed him not just about religious matters but about hotter issues too, including German rearmament.

Ebbutt’s other challenge, of course, was to get his reports into print without partisan distortion. Donald McLachlan, whom the paper twice sent to assist in the Berlin office in the mid-1930s, called Ebbutt ‘a master’ of ‘one of the highest skills of the foreign correspondent’, which is ‘to find ways of getting into his message points of difference with his office’. Such techniques include attributing critical views to a third party, claiming a story is an exclusive to make it hard to ignore, saying that any editorial change might endanger himself or an informant, or burying an explosive conclusion – such as that war with Germany was inevitable – in the middle of an otherwise undramatic piece. Ebbutt tended to file his pieces late, which McLachlan attributed to ‘the pains he took to construct unbreakable paragraphs’. Ebbutt explained away the complex style of his articles to Dawson by saying that ‘everything in Germany is tortuous now.’

An example of his skill in conveying to an alert reader that Germany was gearing up for war without saying so directly comes in his last dispatch from Berlin, on 13 August 1937. It is a long, densely written article, mostly concerning ‘the formation of a state company to develop Germany’s extensive deposits of low-grade iron ore’, and the government’s effort to reduce dependence on foreign foodstuffs and raw materials. Well into the piece the reader learns that more steel is needed because ‘the state-financed economic recovery is based on a huge rearmament.’ Several hundred words further on, Ebbutt says that the new industrial plants will be situated ‘in regions less vulnerable to air attack than the Rhineland’. Without ever saying so, he leaves no doubt that Germany is preparing for war.

Despite his complaints about censorship, Ebbutt mostly succeeded in getting his views of the Nazis and Germany across to the reader. Writing in the Evening Standard about his expulsion, Winston Churchill had no difficulty distinguishing between the Times, which has ‘consistently been an apologist of Germany’ and Ebbutt, who ‘has never twisted the facts’. How much impact did Ebbutt’s reports have on events? Douglas Reed, his former deputy, wrote that ‘his dispatches were paid the greatest of all compliments – they were read by his colleagues.’ In other words, he set the agenda for other journalists and thereby influenced the influencers.

At the end of the final chapter of his memoir – having possibly decided that he was too disabled to complete it – Ebbutt asks himself if it was ‘worth it [to be] in Berlin in 1933, in spite of the failure of warnings [about the Nazi regime] and the personal outcome? It was. I do not regret it in any way.’