Title: Churchill and Germany: A �Special� Relationship
Subject: History 0.0

OTTE

CHURCHILL AND GERMANY

Churchill and Germany: A ‘Special’ Relationship
T. G. OTTE
University of East Anglia (UEA), Norwich, UK
Abstract
No other country defined the trajectory of Churchill’s political career more than Germany, a country of which he had little direct knowledge but which he either sought to emulate, accommodate or oppose throughout his time in politics. This article traces Churchill’s relationship with Germany from his entry into politics at the beginning of the Edwardian era through to the end of his life, when a newly prosperous West Germany had become a fixture in Cold War international politics.
To describe Winston Churchill’s relationship with Germany as ‘special’ may suggest a case of contrarianism. He himself after all had popularized the term ‘special relationship’ with reference to the Anglo-American wartime alliance.^1 And, by the same token, his complex and shifting relations with other countries might, with equal justification, be described as ‘special’.^2 Still, no other country defined the trajectory of his political career more than Germany, a country of which he had little direct knowledge, whose language he did not speak and whose cultural heritage was largely unfamiliar to him. Neither German philosophy – so influential in Victorian Britain – nor German literature meant anything to him; he did not show any appreciation of German art, though he did, he did not lack in artistic talent, and he had no ear for German music (or indeed any other). His understanding of the internal politics of the different Germanies of his lifetime was, at most, partial, and his grasp of social developments there was no firmer. He was better acquainted with German history, but even here his knowledge was ‘partial and selective’.^3 This circumstance was reflective, perhaps, of the complexities and discontinuities that so troubled Anglo- German relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.^4

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Churchill was no professional historian, of course, and his knowledge of other countries was not necessarily more comprehensive. Even so, the past, as he understood it, was foundational to his approach to politics, infusing it with ‘an historical imagination so strong, so comprehensive, as to encase the whole of the present and the whole of the future in a framework of a rich and multi-coloured past’, not unlike ‘a great Renaissance pageant’. Foreign countries conjured up
vivid historical images – something between Victorian illustrations in a child’s book of history and the great procession painted by Benozzo Gozzoli in the Riccardi Palace. His eye is never that of…the patient historical scholar. […] The units of which his world is constructed are simpler and larger than life, the patterns vivid and repetitive like those of an epic poet, or at times like those of a dramatist who sees persons and situations as timeless symbols and embodiments of eternal, shining principles. The whole is…either suffused with bright light or cast in darkest shadow, like a legend by Carpaccio, with scarcely a nuance, painted in primary colours, with no half tones, nothing intangible, nothing impalpable, nothing half spoken or hinted or whispered: the voice does not alter in pitch or timbre.

Isaiah Berlin’s observation can scarcely be bettered: Isaiah Berlin, Mr. Churchill in 1940 (London, s.a. [c. 1950]), pp. 12 and 13. See also Maurice Ashley, Churchill as Historian (London, 1968), pp. 12–21.

It was in line with Churchill’s preference for primary colours that foreign nations mattered first and foremost in their relations with each other, their alliances and rivalries, their relative military strength and their impact on the great power equilibrium. It was in this light and against this background that Churchill saw Germany often as a threat but more often still a vital part of a stable European order.
‘Organised not only for war but for peace’: Churchill and Germany before 1914
The budding politician Churchill showed no particular interest in foreign affairs. During his early years in parliament, much of his time was consumed with navigating the shoals of the Tory civil war after 1900 before landing on the Liberal shore.
In so far as Germany entered his purview, his impressions were favourable. Under David Lloyd George’s tutelage, he was apprenticed in the politics of Radicalism. He proved a quick and willing apprentice. The former pro-Boer, firebrand Welsh attorney and the renegade Tory soldier-adventurer made for an unlikely, but effective, pairing that set the tone of Radical politics. Both had imbibed the precepts of ‘New Liberalism’ with its emphasis on state action and social reform. Though they might have found certain aspects of Wilhelmine Germany objectionable, to many on the Liberal left, the country was nevertheless a beacon of enlightened welfare legislation. Unlike Edwardian Britain, Germany appeared to be a model of stability. No doubt, there were minor irritations. The ‘upwardly mobile under-secretary’, attending the Prussian autumn manoeuvres in Silesia in 1906 at the invitation of the German emperor, bristled a little when his august host ‘was pleased to be sarcastic’ about British concerns about German meddling in South Africa. More telling than such pique was the fact that when Churchill returned three years later, once more as the Kaiser’s guest but by now a Cabinet minister as President of the Board of Trade, he also made a point of visiting labour exchanges in Frankfurt and Strasburg to gain a personal insight into practical aspects of German social insurance legislation.
What he saw impressed him, as he told his Dundee constituents at the end of that year: ‘I saw…hundreds of workmen who were unemployed through the severe trade depression…[…] [T]here was not one of them among forty or fifty who had not in his pocket an insurance card stamped and in order, which entitled him to benefit in sickness, in invalidity, in infirmity, or old age.’

For Churchill’s relations with Lloyd George, see Richard Toye, Lloyd George and Churchill: Rivals for Greatness (London, 2007), and for Germany as a model, E. P. Hennock, The Origins of the Welfare State in England and Germany, 1850–1914 (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 218–34.

Churchill to Elgin, 14 September 1906, in Randolph S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill, ii, Young Statesman, 1901– 1914 (London, 1967), p. 196. The characterization is from Roy Jenkins, Churchill (London, 2001), p. 111.

Churchill speech at Dundee, 28 December 1909, Churchill, Churchill, ii, pp. 312–3. For a discussion of some of this, see Paul Addison, Churchill on the Home Front, 1900–1955 (London, 1992), pp. 51–109.

If there was a sense of any German ‘threat’, Churchill did not share it. On the contrary, on entering the Cabinet, in a pincer movement with Lloyd George, he launched a coruscating attack on defence spending in the summer of 1908. While his mentor was scattering friendly words addressed to the Berlin government like confetti in press interviews during a visit to Germany, Churchill pushed ‘wild schemes’ of a far-flung network of free trade treaties, with Britain and Germany at its heart. In a characteristically flamboyant speech at Swansea, he ridiculed the idea of war between the two countries. There might be ‘snapping and snarling in the newspapers and in the London press’, he suggested, but ‘these two great peoples have nothing to fight about, have no prize to fight for, and have no place to fight in’. There was also snapping in Downing Street at the intervention by the finance and trade ministers. Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, pointed out ‘the fallacy of some of [Churchill’s] statements’, and an infuriated King Edward VII blamed the Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, for having allowed ‘them ever to make speeches on foreign affairs, concerning which they know nothing’.

British Library, Manuscript Collections, Ripon MSS, Add. MSS. 43541: Ripon to Morley (private), 18 July 1908.

Churchill speech at Swansea on 15 August 1908, as reported in The Times, 17 August 1908. For the press and the ‘flowering’ of the antagonism, see especially Kennedy, The Anglo-German Antagonism, 251–90 et passim.

Hardinge to Edward VII, 24 August 1908, in Randolph S. Churchill, Winston S. Churchill ii, Companion Part 2, 1907–1911 (London, 1969), 836. The reply from 25 August 1908 features in vol. 14 of the Hardinge papers at Cambridge University Library.

The two were swiftly brought to heel, but not for long. Churchill kept pressing for ‘a tremendous policy in social organization’, which he suggested was ‘urgent & the time is ripe. Germany…is organised not only for war, but for peace. We are organised for nothing except party politics.’ He also sided with the so-called ‘economists’ in the row over additional dreadnoughts to be laid down in 1909–10 because he did not agree ‘that national security [was] involved in the question.’ The prospect of senior ministers resigning ended the row, or as Asquith put it in his inimitable style: ‘a sudden curve suddenly developed itself of which I took immediate advantage,… which satisfied [ministers].’

Bodleian Archives and Manuscripts, Oxford, Archive of Herbert Henry Asquith (hereafter: Asquith MSS), Ms. Asquith 11: Churchill to Asquith, 29 December 1908. See also Lloyd George to Churchill, 21 December 1908, in Churchill, Churchill Companion ii/3, 937.

The National Archives, London (hereafter: TNA), Cabinet Papers, CAB 37/97/19: Memo. Churchill, ‘A Note on Naval Estimates’ (secret), 2 February 1909. For a detailed discussion, see my ‘Grey ambassadors: The Dreadnought revolution and British diplomacy, 1906–1914’, in Andrew Lambert and Jan Rueger (eds), The Dreadnought and the Edwardian Age (Farnham, 2011), pp. 61–3.

Bodleian Archives and Manuscripts, Archive of Margot Asquith, Ms.Eng.c.6690: Asquith to Margot Asquith, 16 February 1909.

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At least in public, Churchill remained sceptical of the need for major armaments programmes. In an open letter to the chairman of his constituency party, he dismissed the ‘dreadnought fear-all school’. Its clamour for more ships notwithstanding, ‘we see at work in every land, the foundations of European peace laid more broadly and more deeply every year’. This was, perhaps, a case of shrewd positioning in the internal disputes of the Edwardian Liberal party. Churchill was well aware that, in ordinary
times, the rank-and-file of his chosen party, especially so on the Celtic fringe, were ‘keen peace men’.

‘National Defence’, The Times, 15 April 1909; also in Henry Pelling, Winston Churchill (London, 1974), p. 123. Churchill set out his ideas at the end of the year in The People’s Rights (London, 1909), esp. pp. 131–56.

Bodleian Archives and Manuscripts, Oxford, Archive of Arthur Ponsonby, Ms.Eng.his.c.660: Robertson [chairman, Stirling Burghs Liberal Association] to Ponsonby, 5 August 1914.

Whatever the politics of Churchill’s public pronouncements, he did not wilfully ignore the disruptive potential of Europe’s arms races. Not only had he attended the annual manoeuvres in Germany in 1906 and 1909, he had also observed the Army exercises on Salisbury Plain in 1908 and 1910 (he still held the rank of a major in the Oxfordshire yeomanry, a Blenheim connection). He was thus able to compare the forces of the two countries. That judgment was more nuanced and shot through with a degree of pessimism that stood in stark contrast to the optimistic tone of his public speeches. ‘This army is a terrible engine’, he wrote to his wife after a day out with his German hosts:
It marches 35 miles a day. It is in numbers as the sands at sea – & with all the modern conveniences. There is a complete divorce between the two sides of German life – the Imperialists & the Socialists. Nothing unites them. They are two different nations. […] Much as war attracts me & fascinates my mind with its tremendous situations – I feel more deeply every year - & can measure the feeling here in the midst of the arms – what a vile & wicked folly & barbarism it all is.

Churchill to Clementine, 15 September 1909, in Churchill, Churchill ii, p. 225. For the centrality of war to Churchill’s life, see Geoffrey Best, Churchill and War (London, 2005).

These darker ruminations were penned exactly five months after Churchill’s open letter to his Dundee constituents. Whether he had espied the horrors of modern war underneath the clinking breastplates of Prussian cuirassiers or the massed ranks of the field-grey infantry, Churchill’s assessment of the international situation, and hence of Germany, had begun to change. When during the Agadir crisis, a Franco-German stand-off over Morocco, Europe seemed to stand at the edge of war, his ‘high-metalled spirit was exhilarated by the air of crisis’, as Grey later recalled. Most days, the two ministers sought relief from the sweltering heat of that July in the baths of the Automobile Club, its cold waters reviving Grey’s spirits and ‘cooling…[Churchill’s] ardour’.

Viscount Grey of Fallodon, Twenty Five Years (2 vols., New York, 1925) i, p. 230. Grey had just agreed to become godfather to the Churchills’ son, Randolph: Churchill College Archive Centre, Clementine Churchill papers, CSCT 3/13, Grey to Clementine Churchill, 28 June 1911. See also T. G. Otte, Statesman of Europe: A Life of Sir Edward Grey (London, 2020), p. 417.

Churchill, who had been moved to the Home Office in the previous year, was no more inclined to respect departmental demarcations now than during his spell at the Board of Trade. He had sloughed off the skin of Radicalism, however, and now stood revealed as a staunch advocate of a firm foreign policy. The dispatch of a gunboat to Agadir had ‘put [Germany] in the wrong & forced us to consider her claims in the light of her policy & methods’. If there was a deadlock in any Franco-German pourparlers, ‘we must secure Brit[ish] interests independently’. If Berlin were to opt for war, ‘we sh[oul]d join with France’.

Memo. Churchill, n.d. [c. July 1911], in Churchill, Churchill ii, 523. On the crisis, see Jean-Claude Allain, Agadir 1911: Une crise impérialiste en Europe pour la conquête du Maroc (Paris, 1976); and Emily Oncken, Panthersprung nach Agadir: Die deutsche Politik während der zweiten Marokkokrise 1911 (Düsseldorf, 1981); and further my ‘Entente diplomacy v. détente, 1911–1914’, in Dominik Geppert, William Mulligan and Andreas Rose (eds), The Wars before the Great War: Conflict and International Politics before the Outbreak of the First World War (Cambridge, 2015), pp. 264–66.

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Churchill’s, largely unsolicited, contributions to Whitehall discussions in the aftermath of the Agadir crisis were a curious mixture of the farsighted and the fantastical. In mid-August 1911, to pre-empt the deliberations of the Committee
of Imperial Defence, he circulated a lengthy memorandum on the problems of a continental war. In many respects, this was an astonishing piece of concise strategic thinking, and in light of the events of 1914 it was also strikingly prescient. A European conflict would most likely commence with a German sweep through Belgium, but as the advancing armies pressed on towards Paris, by around the fortieth day of their offensive, they would lose momentum. To check their progress, he suggested sending a 107,000-strong expeditionary force to reinforce the French left wing. If successful, he concluded, ‘the German armies will be confronted with a situation which combines an ever-growing need for a successful offensive, with a battle-front which tends continually towards numerical equality. Opportunities for a decisive trial of strength may then occur.’ Acute as his military judgment was, his grasp of foreign policy was less assured. At the end of the month, he also proposed ‘a triple alliance’ with France and Russia for the defence of the Low Countries and Denmark, based on close military cooperation: ‘Our interests are European, and not Moroccan.’

TNA, CAB 4/3/2/132B: Memo. Churchill, ‘Military Aspects of the Continental Problem’, [13] Aug. 1911; partially in Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, 1911–1914 (London, 1923), pp. 60–4. For my assessment of the CID meeting, see T. G. Otte, ‘“The method in which we were schooled by experience”: British strategy and a continental commitment before 1914’, in K. Neilson and G. Kennedy (ed.), The British Way in Warfare: Power and the International System, 1856–1956: Essays in Honour of David French (Aldershot, 2010), pp. 301–24, at pp. 320–2.

TNA, David Lloyd George papers [hereafter: Lloyd George MSS], YLG/C/3/15/7: Churchill to Grey (secret), 30 August 1911.

Whatever the quality of Churchill’s advice, the most significant consequence of the CID meeting was institutional. Asquith agreed to an extensive reorganization of the Admiralty with Churchill now at its head. It was a risky manoeuvre, but the Prime Minister may well have appreciated the disruptive force of his new First Lord. As Richard B. Haldane noted, accurately if dismissively, Churchill, ‘full of energy and imagination as he is,…does not know his problem or the vast field of thought that has to be covered. He is too apt to act first and think afterwards.’

National Library of Scotland, Richard B. Haldane papers, MS 5909: Haldane to Grey, 2 October 1911.

At the Admiralty Churchill’s conversion to a ‘big navy’ man was complete. He was determined to meet the German challenge at sea. Naval policy under Churchill, in fact, followed closely the line established by Grey at the Foreign Office. Britain’s margin of maritime superiority had to be maintained. Beyond that, the door was never shut to diplomatic efforts to settle differences with Germany. When, in early 1912, the German-born financier Sir Ernest Cassel tried to interest Churchill in the idea of a personal meeting with Wilhelm II, he poured cold water on the suggestion: ‘all that c[oul]d be said on our part w[oul]d be that till Germany dropped the Naval challenge her policy w[oul]d be continually viewed here with deepening suspicion & apprehension; but that any slackening on her part w[oul]d produce an immediate détente with much good will from all England.’ He deplored Anglo-German tensions,
for as you know I have never had any but friendly feelings towards that great nation & her illustrious Sovereign & I regard the antagonism wh[ich] has developed as insensate. Anything in my power to terminate it, I w[oul]d gladly do. But the only way I see open is one which I fear Germany will be reluctant to take.

Churchill to Cassel, 7 January 1912, as featured in Churchill, Churchill ii, pp. 560–1; Keith Robbins, Churchill (London, 1992), 49–55.

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That step lay beyond practical politics, though this was more a matter of personal rivalries between the German chancellor and the head of the Imperial High Seas Battlefleet paralysing decision-making at Berlin. British policy had to move cautiously:

The only chance I see is roughly this. They will announce their new programme, & we will make an immediate & effective reply. Then if they care to slow down the “tempo” so that their Fleet Law is accomplished in 12 and not in 6 years, friendly relations w[oul]d ensue, & we, though I sh[oul]d be reluctant to bargain about it, c[oul]d slow down too. All they w[oul]d have to do w[oul]d be to make their quotas biennial instead of annual. Nothing w[oul]d be deranged in their plan. 12 years of tranquillity w[oul]d be assured in naval policy.

TNA, Foreign Office papers, Grey MSS, FO 800/97: Churchill to Grey, 31 January 1912, See also John H. Maurer, ‘Churchill’s naval holiday: Arms control and the Anglo-German naval race, 1912–1914’, Journal of Strategic Studies 15/1 (1992), pp. 102–27.

The ‘effective reply’ to the German Novelle – the latest amendment to the current navy law which made provisions for an increase by half in battle readiness and for the laying down of 15 capital ships over the next six years – was set out by Churchill when introducing the naval estimates in March 1912. To maintain a 16-to-10 standard (or 60% preponderance), London would lay down two capital ships for every additional German vessel. Coupled to this assertion of British naval power was a political offer: ‘any retardation or reduction in German construction will…be promptly followed here…by large and fully proportioned reductions.’ This was no different from Churchill’s response to Cassel’s overture. Crucially, the offer of some form of arrangement, informal or formal, was underpinned by an element of deterrence: Britain would out-build and out-pace the German armaments programme so as to compel the Germans to agree to some form of arms control. This was an entirely rational response to growing evidence of a latent financial crisis in Germany.

Churchill speech in House of Commons, 18 March 1912, Parliamentary Debates, 5th ser. xxxv, col. 1557; Jonathan Steinberg, ‘Diplomatie als Wille und Vorstellung: Die Berliner Mission Lord Haldanes im Februar 1912’, in Herbert Schottelius and Wilhelm Deist (eds), Marine und Marinepolitik im kaiserlichen Deutschland, 1871–1914 (Düsseldorf, 2nd ed. 1981), 263–82. See also T. G. Otte, ‘“What we desire is confidence”: The search for an Anglo-German naval agreement, 1909-1912’, in Keith Hamilton and Edward Johnson (eds), Arms and Armaments in Diplomacy (London, OR, 2008), pp. 43–5.

Lloyd George MSS, YLG/C/4/14/6: memo. Angst, n.d. [c. 17 March 1912].

To ratchet up the pressure further, Churchill decided to concentrate the Royal Navy in home waters. In parallel with the withdrawal of capital ships from the Mediterranean, the government should pursue a reciprocal arrangement with France: ‘An Anglo-French alliance w[oul]d be able to maintain full control of the Mediter[ranea]n, & afford all necessary protection to British & French interests both territorial & commercial, without impairing British margins in the North Sea.’ He did not advocate an entangling alliance with France (his phraseology often tended to be loose). Rather, it was part of that policy of ‘caution’ that made him tread warily. The technical qualities of the German battleships left no doubt ‘that they are intended for attack and fleet action. They are not a cruiser fleet designed to protect Colonies and commerce all over the world.’ Berlin had spent vast sums on building up the battlefleet

TNA, Admiralty Papers, ADM 116/3110: Memo. Churchill (sec), 15 June 1912. Further minutes in TNA, Cabinet Office papers, CAB 2/2: 117th CID meeting, 4 July 1912. See also Peter Gretton, Winston Churchill and the Royal Navy (New York, 1969), pp. 132–37.

and I think it is useless and foolish to shut one’s eyes to the fact that whatever may be the intention of the German Government, and whatever may be the intention of the German people, which is quite a different thing, the spirit and purpose of the inception and of the prolonged development of the German navy is such as to lead only to one conclusion, and that is that it is intended for a great trial of strength with the navy of the greatest naval Power.

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[…] I do not pretend to make any suggestion that the Germans would deliver any surprise or sudden attack upon us. It is not for us to assume that another great nation
will fall markedly below the standard of civilisation which we ourselves would be bound by; but we at the Admiralty have got to see, not that they will not do it, but that they cannot do it.

TNA, Cabinet Office Papers, CAB 2/2/3: minutes of 118th CID meeting, 11 July 1912.

This was an implicit acknowledgment that arms races created their own inescapable logic – one that paid but scant regard for the standards of civilized behaviour. That same logic brought the German government to the edge of conceding defeat in the naval race, though it was the strenuous French and Russian efforts to strengthening their armies around 1912–13 that added to Berlin’s financial predicament. Churchill persisted with his idea of multilateral arms limitation talks, an idea more pressing now as Britain’s relations with France and Russia were somewhat more distant and various other powers had begun to build their dreadnoughts. Any reduction of naval expenditure, the foreign secretary agreed, was ‘no longer a matter for which England and Germany alone can be responsible, but…it is a question that can only be dealt with by England and Germany in concert with their respective friends and allies’.

Grey to Goschen (private), 28 October 1913 inG. P. Gooch and Harold W. V. Temperley (eds), British Documents on the Origins of the War, 1898–1914 [hereafter: BD] (11 vols., London, 1928–38) x/2, no. 488; hence Churchill’s warning of ‘a great preponderance of loose Dreadnoughts, wh[ich] at v[ery] short notice, a diplomatic grouping or regrouping may range against us’, to Grey (personal and secret), 24 October 1913, ibid., no. 487; Otte, ‘“Grey ambassadors”’, pp. 74–5.

It is unclear whether Churchill hoped to use an Anglo-German ‘naval holiday’ as the nucleus of a wider arms limitation agreement or else to settle the naval race in the North Sea within such a multilateral framework. Hopes of securing an arrangement remained unfulfilled. The Germans refused Churchill’s three proposals of a moratorium, and Grey and his officials concluded that it was better to let matters run their natural course. Mounting financial pressure would terminate the naval race eventually, while suggesting a resumption of formal talks would merely prolong it. If anything, the simultaneous exchanges between the Colonial Secretary and the German embassy held out a much better prospect of improved relations with Germany. It was for this reason that Grey prevented Churchill from attending the annual Kiel regatta in June 1914, lest he meet the Kaiser. Two such ebullient men, each apt to be carried away by the flood of their own words, were more likely to complicate matters. Nevertheless, to keep up the pressure on Berlin, Grey and Churchill insisted on provisions for four dreadnoughts in the 1914–5 naval estimates, even at the price of another bitter Cabinet crisis in the winter of 1913–4.

TNA, Foreign and Commonwealth Office records, FO 371/1649/7482: minute by Crowe, 17 February 1913, on Goschen to Grey (no. 58), 10 February 1913.

Memo. Grey, 25 May 1914, BD x/2, no. 512. William Tyrrell, Grey’s private secretary, earlier summed up the Kaiser as ‘a man of words – a truly modern Emperor; in fact, the Winston of Germany’, to Spring Rice, as featured in FO 800/241, Spring Rice MSS, letter of 15 April 1908. For a fuller discussion, see my ‘“The Winston of Germany”: The British foreign policy elite and the last German emperor’, in Canadian Journal of History, 36/4 (2001), pp. 471–504.

Lloyd George MSS, YLG/C/3/16/3: Churchill to Lloyd George, 19 Jan. 1914. See also B. K. Murray, ‘Lloyd George, the navy estimates, and the inclusion of rating relief in the 1914 budget’, Welsh History Review 15/1 (1990), pp. 58–78.

‘A real understanding with Germany’? Churchill and Germany until 1933

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It was one of the ironies of Europe’s descent into war that when the lights went out, the Anglo-German naval race hardly mattered any longer. For Churchill, whatever the romantic appeal of war ‘with its tremendous situations’, European conflict was
a ‘calamity for civilised nations’. He still placed hope in the power of personal diplomacy and thought the German emperor a man of peace. To avert the threatened calamity, he suggested a crisis summit meeting between the crowned heads of Europe ‘for [the] sake of Peace’, but Asquith was sceptical: ‘[N]o help can be looked for in this direction.’

TNA, Commonwealth and Foreign Office records, FO 371/1991/28028: Goschen to Grey (no. 244), 16 June 1914. The literature on the subject is vast; my own views are set out in detail, inter alia, in ‘“Grey Ambassadors”’, esp. pp. 74–8, ‘Détente 1914: Sir William Tyrrell’s secret mission to Germany’, Historical Journal 56/1 (2013), pp. 175–204, and ‘“Postponing the Evil Day”: Sir Edward Grey and British foreign policy’, International History Review xxxviii, 2 (2016), 250–63 at pp. 257–62.

Pease diary, 29 July 1914, in Cameron Hazlehurst and Christine Woodland (eds), A Liberal Chronicle in Peace and War: Journals and Papers of J.A. Pease, 1st Lord Gainsford, 1911–1915 (Oxford, 2023), p. 323. Churchill stuck to the view that Wilhelm II was no warmonger: id., Great Contemporaries (London, 1959 (pb)), pp. 33–4.

As the continental powers mobilized, Churchill’s views hardened, and some ministers thought him ‘very bellicose’, ‘very violent’ and domineering. That perception of bellicosity was perhaps more a reflection of the quasi-pacifist sensibilities of many of his ministerial colleagues. Churchill was not an advocate of war at all costs, but he accepted it as increasingly likely, as he explained to a leading Radical critic of government policy:

Asquith to Venetia Stanley, 1 August 1914, in Michael and Eleanor Brock (eds), Asquith: Letters to Venetia Stanley (Oxford, 1985 (pb.)), p. 140; and the Harcourt cabinet notes, 1 August 1914 (as featured in the Lewis Harcourt papers, Bodleian Archives and Manuscripts, Oxford, no shelfmark). See also Cameron Hazlehurst, Politicians at War, July 1914 to May 1915: A Prologue to the Triumph of Lloyd George (London, 1971), pp. 87–91.

So long as no treaty obligation or true British interest is involved,…we should remain neutral. Balkan quarrels are no vital concern of ours. We have done our best to keep the peace & shall continue so to do to the end. But the march of events is sinister. The extension of the conflict by a German attack upon France or Belgium w[oul]d raise other issues than those which now exist, and it w[oul]d be wrong at this moment to pronounce finally one way or the other as to our duty or our interests.

Ponsonby MSS, Ms. Eng. his. c. 660: Churchill to Ponsonby (private), 31 July 1914. See also T. G. Otte, July 1914: The World’s Descent into War, Summer 1914 (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 493–95.

Ultimately, the march of events could not be stopped. With the declaration of war on Russia, ‘Germany ha[d] quenched the last hopes of peace’, Churchill noted: ‘But the world is gone mad – & we must look after ourselves.’ In many ways, Churchill was in his element now that the government had to face the ‘tremendous situations’ of war. ‘You want a new war with someone once a week’, Grey quipped during one Cabinet meeting at the end of October. For all that, Churchill’s attitude towards Germany underwent no fundamental change. In public, there was the inevitable tubthumping patriotic oratory. In a speech to a packed Tournament Hall in Liverpool at the end of September 1914, for instance, he blamed the war on Germany:

Churchill to wife, 1 August 1914, in Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, iii, 1914–1916 (London, repr. 1977), p. 25.

Lewis Harcourt papers, no shelfmark: Harcourt Cabinet notes, 30 October 1914.

As to the causes of the war, you have but to cast your minds back to 1860, from which time can be traced successive acts of violence on the part of Germany. […] Germany began the building of a great navy for our undoing. Every detail of the German scheme proved that it was meant for us – for our exclusive benefit. (Laughter.)’
Belgium’s sufferings would not go unredeemed, he promised to loud cheers: ‘The might of England will be exerted patiently until full reparation has been obtained.’ Until then, there could be no peace:

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Peace! ah, we are only just beginning. (Great cheering.) Peace with the German people may be arranged in good time, but peace with Prussian militarism? — no peace short of the grave with that vile tyranny. (Renewed cheers.) Peace will be found,…when the worthy causes for which we are fighting have been fully achieved. We may live to see the Christian States of the Balkans restored to their proper racial limits; we may see Italy’s territory correspond with her Italian population; we may see France restored to
her proper station in Europe and in her rightful place; and we may see that Old England had something to do with it all.

Churchill speech at Liverpool, 21 September 1914, as reported in The Times, 22 September 1914. For an impression of the public discourse, see Peter Buitenhuis, The Great War of Words: Literature and Propaganda 1914–1918 and After (London, 1989), pp. 21–36.

The Liverpool speech was significant on two counts. In the first place, underneath that thick layer of rhetorical flummery, there lay a hard core of sophisticated and nuanced thinking about international politics. Germany, having embarked on an aggressive policy, had to be defeated and be held to account for breaking the peace of Europe. But there would have to be a peace settlement in the end, and Germany had to be given a secure place in that new postwar order. Secondly, the speech also revealed something of Churchill’s fascination with Prussia, which he regarded as a concentrated, but malign and perverted, essence of German national characteristics.

For anti-Prussianism in wartime Britain, see Stuart Wallace, War and the Image of Germany: British Academics, 1914–1918 (Edinburgh, 1988), pp. 66–73 et passim.

Now that Britain was at war, Churchill, first at the Admiralty and then, after his post-Dardanelles redemption at the Ministry of Munitions, was preoccupied with organizing Britain’s military effort and had little time to consider what was to become of Germany after the fighting was over. But it had to be defeated. In July 1917, seeking re-election at Dundee, in the face of growing war-weariness and despite the first cracks emerging in the wartime alliance, Churchill insisted on the need for unwavering determination in the prosecution of the war: ‘If ever there was a time in the history of this island when Britain should be a rock, it is now.’ At the end of the year, the outlook was at its darkest. Unrestricted submarine warfare was at its height, the Nivelle offensive, of which so much had been expected, had come to a halt at Chemins des Dames, and on the Italian front Austro-German armies had broken through at Caporetto. Churchill remained defiant in public:

Dundee Advertiser, 23 July 1917, as quoted in Pelling, Churchill, p. 230. In line with contemporary constitutional convention, Churchill had to seek re-election following his return to the Cabinet.

We have never fought, and we are not fighting, for booty or revenge. ［…］ We shall be satisfied when the Prussian militarism is unmistakably beaten and the German people are saved from its evil spell. ［…］ ［A］ll must be ready, all must be there; we have only to act together and we have only to act at once.

Churchill speech at Bedford, 10 December 1917, as quoted in Frederick W. F. Smith, Earl of Birkenhead, Churchill, 1874–1922 (London, 1989), p. 442.

He warned against defeatism and all suggestions of a negotiated peace, such as that made by the former foreign secretary Lord Lansdowne. He urged his constituents in August 1918:
Let us not delude ourselves that there is any substitute for victory. ［…］ A Peace made now would for all time register & rivet upon the world the appearance of German power taken at its culminating point. ［…］ A peace upon the accomplished facts of German triumph, at the hour when German triumph is tottering would shut out for many years from mankind their native right.

Draft message to Dundee constituents, 3 August 1918, as quoted in Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, p. iv, 1916–1922: World in Torment (London, repr. 1990), pp. 128–30. See also Simon Kerry, Lansdowne: The Last Great Whig (London, 2017), pp. 280–303.

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Behind that face of resolve, there nestled an element of pessimism, rooted in a grudging respect of Germany. ‘I do not like the situation now developing and do not think all that is possible is being done to meet it’, he wrote to Lloyd George in early 1918 – a few weeks before the last German offensive in the West: ‘The Germans
are a terrible foe, & their generals are better than ours.’ Ultimately, that superior quality was not enough to prevent defeat. When the German high command agreed to an armistice in November 1918, Churchill urged moderation, fearful that a punitive peace might provoke a fierce backlash in Germany of either a Bolshevik kind or a militarist kind:

Lloyd George MSS, YLG/F/8/2/19: Churchill to Lloyd George, 19 January 1918.

we must proceed with great care and vigilance, seeking to influence matters that government might be created in Germany strong enough to shoulder the burden of reparation and yet not capable of renewing the war. Such a problem will tax to the utmost limits all the resources of wisdom, of virtue and of statecraft which the victorious Powers command.

Churchill to Dundee constituents, 18 November 1918, as quoted in Gilbert, Churchill iv, p. 168.

The peace settlement had to be firm but not harsh, and reparations had to be part of it. Electoral calculations undoubtedly played a role in Churchill’s public statements (the Liberal split left his hold on the Dundee constituency fragile -). He did not flinch from the odd linguistic concession to anti-German sentiments during the ‘coupon election’:
Practically the whole German nation was guilty of the crime of aggressive war conducted by brutal and bestial means. It is no use their pretending that their late Government is solely to blame. They were all in it, and they must all suffer for it. In particular, individuals against whom definite breaches of the laws of war on land and sea can be proved or who can be proved to have treated prisoners with cruelty should be brought to trial and punished as criminals, however highly placed.

Churchill speech at Kinnaird Hall, Dundee, 26 November 1918, as quoted in ibid., pp. 170–1.

This was as close as Churchill ever came to parroting Lloyd George’s ‘Hang the Kaiser’ slogan, though he left unsaid how any of the alleged breaches of international law were to be proven. The terms of the peace settlement would have to include territorial losses and indemnities: ‘Alsace-Lorraine must be completely restored to France. Poland must be reconstituted a nation with access to the sea, and Germany must give up her Polish provinces. None of the German colonies will ever be restored to Germany.’ As for reparations, these would have to fixed ‘to the utmost limit possible’. Punishment would be ‘terrible beyond all previous record’, but it was ‘not physically possible’ for Germany to pay the expenses of the war in their entirety.

Ibid. See also Friedrich Weckerlein, Streitfall Deutschland: Die British Linke und die ‘Demokratisierung’ des Deutschen Reiches, 1900–1918 (Göttingen, 1994), pp. 387–98.

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Churchill was not involved in the Paris Peace Conference, except for his brief attendance of the Council of Ten in a vain attempt to rally support for ‘active assistance to the anti-Bolsheviks’ in the Russian Civil War. But he urged his ministerial colleagues to accept the need for moderation. Germany, he impressed upon the War Cabinet in early 1919, had to be ‘treated humanely and adequately fed, and her industries restarted’. As the cabinet minutes recorded, he ‘had little patience with the cranks of various kinds who denied that Germany suffered any privations at all’. Partly because of his Russian concerns, Churchill counselled moderation in making
peace with Germany. As Bismarck and later Lenin had understood, so Churchill appreciated the fundamental geopolitical nexus between Germany and Russia on which the future of any European order would rest:

Lloyd George MSS, YLG/F/89/2/16: Kerr to Lloyd George, n.d. [c. 15 February 1919]. Lloyd George hoped that Churchill would ‘not commit us to any costly operation which would involve any large contribution either of men or money’, telegram to Kerr (no. 177, ‘very urgent’), 16 February 1919, as featured in Lloyd George MSS, F/89/2/19. See also Howard Elcock, Portrait of a Decision: The Council of Four and the Treaty of Versailles (London, 1972), pp. 91– 7 and T. G. Otte, ‘The persistence of old diplomacy: The Paris peace settlement in perspective’, in Peter Jackson, William Mulligan and Glenda Sluga (eds), Peacemaking and International Order after World War One (Cambridge, 2023), pp. 381–406.

TNA, Cabinet Office Papers, CAB 23/9: Minutes of War Cabinet, 28 February 1919.

There will be no peace in Europe until Russia is restored. […] If we abandon Russia, Germany and Japan will not. The new States…in the East will be crushed between Russian Bolshevism and Germany. Germany will regain by her influence over Russia far more than she lost in colonies overseas or provinces in the West.

Churchill to Lloyd George, 17 February 1919 (draft not sent), as quoted in Gilbert, Churchill iv, pp. 253–4. See further Douglas Newton, British Policy and the Weimar Republic, 1918–1919 (Oxford, 1997), pp. 318–73; and Peter Alter, ‘“Beschwerliche Reisen über den Kanal”: Großbritannien und Deutschland zwischen den Weltkriegen’, in Mommsen (ed.), Ungleiche Partner, pp. 140–54.

It was for this reason that he pressed Lloyd George ‘to reach a settlement with the present German Government, and to reach it as speedily as possible’. He thought the provisional government at Berlin ‘sincerely desirous of making a beaten peace and preserving an orderly community which will carry out its agreement’. It was natural that it would seek to make ‘counter propositions’ to any terms the Allies might present, ‘and we ought to take these up seriatim with patience and goodwill’ in order to secure ‘a genuine German acceptance of a defeated peace and not be drawn into new dangers measureless in their character’.

Lloyd George MSS, YLG/F/7/8: Churchill to Lloyd George, 20 May 1919. See also, TNA, Curzon MSS, FO 800/149: Curzon to Churchill (secret), 22 August 1919. For the ideological dimension of international politics in 1919, see Arno J. Mayer, Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counter-Revolution at Versailles, 1918–1919 (London, 1968), pp. 453–82.

The complexities of the inter-allied talks at Paris, and the often awkward compromises they produced, did not allow for any gestures of goodwill. Churchill regretted in particular the economic clauses of the Versailles Treaty, which he later described as ‘malignant and silly to an extent that made them obviously futile’. Pace his earlier call for punishing German leaders, in Cabinet he refused to support any such moves: ‘He is all ag[ain]st hanging the Kaiser or trying the German officers – wants a real understanding with Germany. You cannot be both at peace and at war etc etc.’ During the remaining years of Lloyd George’s peacetime administration, Churchill frequently returned to the theme of reconciliation. He was ‘anxious’, he explained to the Dominions premiers in July 1921,

Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War (6 vols., London, 1948–54) i, p. 6. The verdict served conceptual purposes: David Reynolds, In Command of History (New York, 2005), pp. 92–3.

Bodleian Archives and Manuscripts, Oxford, Archive of H. A. L. Fisher, MS Fisher 14: Fisher diary, 14 January 1920.

to see friendship grow up and the hatred of war die between Britain and Germany. I am anxious to see trade relations develop with Germany naturally and harmoniously. I am anxious to see Britain getting all the help and use she can out of Germany in the difficult years that lie before us. […] [I]t might well be that being at once the Ally of France and the friend of Germany, we might be in a position to mitigate the frightful rancour and fear and hatred which exist between France and Germany…which, if left unchecked, will most certainly in a generation or so bring about a renewal of the struggle…we have just witnessed.

TNA, Cabinet Office Papers, CAB 32/2: Minutes of Imperial Conference, 7 July 1921.

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In and out of office for much of the 1920s, Churchill viewed the Weimar Republic from a distance. In the autumn of 1924, having lost his Dundee seat and now edging his way back to the Conservatives, he addressed the Russo-German nexus again. The ‘so-called Peace Treaty’, he wrote, had not banished the danger of renewed war:

Two mighty branches of the European family will never rest content with their existing situation. Russia, stripped of her Baltic Provinces, will…brood incessantly upon the wars of Peter the Great. From one end of Germany to the other an intense hatred of France unites the whole population. ［…］ France is armed to the teeth. Germany has been to a great extent disarmed and her military system broken up. ［…］ But physical force alone, unsustained by world opinion, affords no durable foundation for security. Germany is a far stronger entity than France, and cannot be kept in permanent subjugation.

Winston S. Churchill, ‘Shall we all commit suicide?’, Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine, 24 September 1924, as quoted in Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, v, Prophet of Truth, 1922–1939 (London, 1990 (pb)), 51. For Churchill’s often extravagant anti-Bolshevism, see David Reynolds, The Long Shadow: The Great War and the Twentieth Century (London, 2013), pp. 72–4.

Germany’s re-admission to European politics was one thing, facilitating a resurgence of German power quite another. Whatever the travails of late Weimar Germany, Churchill’s views of the country were still coloured by a sense of its underlying strengths. When in early 1931, chancellor Heinrich Brüning announced preparations for a customs union with neighbouring Austria, Churchill expressed his alarm at what such a move might portend: ‘Beneath the Customs Union lurks the “Anschluss” or union between the German mass and the remains of Austria.’ It would pose a threat to France but also to Czechoslovakia, turning this Habsburg successor state into ‘almost a Bohemian island in boisterous fierce-lapping ocean of Teutonic manhood and efficiency’.

See the Churchill article for Hearst syndicated newspapers, 31 March 1931, as quoted in ibid., pp. 408–9. International opposition and the collapse of Austria’s leading bank put paid to Brüning’s hopes: Jürgen Gehl, Austria, Germany, and the Anschluss, 1931–1938 (Oxford, 1963), pp. 1–38; and Stanley Suval, The Anschluss Question in the Weimar Era: A Study of Nationalism in Germany and Austria, 1918–1932 (Baltimore, MD, 1974), pp. 146–68.

Churchill had no particular insight into Brüning’s struggle for political survival, nor, for that matter, into the manoeuvres of the ultra-conservative camarilla around the aged Reich president Paul von Hindenburg. He took note of the rising tide of German nationalism which, given Germany’s potential future capabilities, hardened his opposition to making further concessions. German military equality with France ‘would bring us to within practical distance of almost measureless calamity’. As already in the immediate aftermath of the recent war, Churchill kept in view the Russo-German nexus:
We must also remember that the great mass of Russia…looms up all along the Eastern frontier of Europe and that the whole row of small States, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland—not a small State, but for this purpose in the line—and Rumania, are under the continued preoccupation of this enormous, and to them in many ways unfriendly Russian power. It may well be that there is no danger, but I expect that if we lived there we should feel rather uncomfortable about it.

Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 5th ser. cclxv (13 May 1932), col. 2352; Philip Towle, ‘Winston Churchill and British disarmament policy’, Journal of Strategic Studies 2/3 (1979), pp. 335–47.

That geopolitical nexus also holds the key to Churchill’s stance during the remainder of that decade and the war years.
‘Tumultuous insurgence of ferocity and war spirit’: Churchill and Nazi Germany

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With the advent of the Hitler regime, Churchill’s views of Germany changed. Even so, implicit in his pronouncements there was a distinction between official National Socialist Germany and his idea of a historical Germany. His intervention in the parliamentary debate on the Geneva Disarmament Conference in March 1933 set

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OTTE 13 the tone for his subsequent campaign to shake government and public opinion out of their complacency about the regime in Berlin. Two months after the Nazi party had seized power, he noted ‘with surprise and distress the tumultuous insurgence of ferocity and war spirit, the pitiless ill-treatment of minorities, the denial of the normal protections of civilised society to large numbers of individuals solely on the ground of race’. As Germany was ‘one of the most gifted, learned, scientific and formidable nations in the world’, it was fortunate that ‘the fierce passions that are raging in Germany have not found, as yet, any other outlet but upon themselves’. In the face of such a fever running through Germany, it was folly to persist with the idea of European disarmament. ‘We may as well face realities’, he warned: ‘Germany and Italy, if united, would immediately have actually larger armies than France, 450,000 to 400,000, even if the whole of the French Colonial force were safely brought back across the Mediterranean.’ French military strength was vital for the security of Europe: ‘If Europe has enjoyed peace this year, it has been under the shield of France. Be careful not to break that shield.’

Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 5th ser. cclxxvi (23 Mar. 1933), cols. 542–3 and 548; Edward Bennett, German Rearmament and the West, 1932–1933 (Princeton, NJ, 1979), pp. 181–3.

Whole oceans of ink have been spilled on Churchill’s crusade to alert the public to the need to re-arm in the face of the growing German threat. This is not the place to add yet another drop to that debate. No doubt, Churchill’s information was often no more than partial (his clandestine access to secret intelligence notwithstanding); he was prone to hyperbole, especially where Germany’s feared superiority in the air was concerned; and many of his proposals were of dubious practicality. The internal workings of the German state remained wrapped in mystery for him, and he invested exaggerated hopes in the old Prussian military elite. In August 1938, for instance, as the Czech crisis waxed once more, he was encouraged by ‘the evident distress of the German people at being dragged into a war’ which, he thought, ‘will create an atmosphere affecting the Generals and the Fuehrer in opposite senses’.

Gill Bennett, Churchill’s Man of Mystery: Desmond Morton and the World of Intelligence (London, 2007).

TNA, Halifax MSS, FO 800/309: Churchill to Halifax, 20 August 1939. See also Andrew Roberts, Holy Fox: A Life of Lord Halifax (London, 1991), pp. 166–75.

Such hopes were illusory. Historians are readier now to acknowledge the constraints – political, financial and military – under which the Baldwin and Chamberlain governments had to act and which Churchill all too often ignored. And yet, underneath all those exaggerations there was a deeper and more accurate understanding of the nature of Hitler’s aims than in Chamberlain’s painstaking, plodding and pedantic reading of the despatches that came across his desk. Perhaps only a failed Chancellor of the Exchequer could put aside financial considerations; and perhaps only an amateur historian with a penchant for painting his images of the past with a broader brush could grasp that sometimes, in the absence of a functioning international equilibrium, great power leaders pursuing aggressive aims could only be checked by force. In this respect certainly, Churchill and the failed artist and autodidact Hitler were well matched. As a final point, it was not German revisionism as such that alarmed Churchill, but rather Hitler’s coveting non-German territories. It was this innate expansionism that made it impossible for him ‘to recognize Germany as a Great Power in the old sense of the word’. After 1918, he had advocated

See, inter alia, R. A. C. Parker, Churchill and Appeasement: Could Churchill have prevented the Second World War? (London, 2000); and Sidney Aster, ‘Appeasement: Before and after revisionism’, Diplomacy & Statecraft 19/3 (2008), pp. 443–80.

For some intelligent speculations, see John Lukacs, The Duel: Hitler vs Churchill, 10 May – 31 July 1940 (London, 1990), pp. 8–16. This should be read in conjunction with David Reynolds, Mirrors of Greatness: Churchill and the Leaders Who Shaped Him (London, 2023), pp. 101–27.

Craig, ‘Churchill’, p. 35.

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reintegrating Germany into the new European polity as vital to a durable postwar settlement. That was no longer a viable policy after 1933. At first tentatively and then increasingly boldly, Hitler had shown that his object was not equality for Germany but her mastery of Europe.
‘Now I hate them like…well, like an earwig’: the war years
Once installed in No. 10 Downing Street, Churchill might well have felt ‘as if I were walking with destiny’. That destiny was to lead the war effort against Germany, and that effort was all-consuming. Churchill ‘is totally engrossed in the war’, the Soviet ambassador was told. He only intermittently considered the shape of postwar Germany, but his occasional comments are suggestive of a deeper sense of the country’s historic place in Europe.

Churchill, Second World War i, 601. This, of course, was mythmaking: David Reynolds, ‘Churchill and the British “decision” to fight on in 1940: Right policy, wrong reasons’, in Richard Langhorne (ed.), Diplomacy and Intelligence during the Second World War: Essays in Honour of F.H. Hinsley (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 147–67; for a critical view, John Charmley, Churchill: The End of Glory. A Political Biography (London, 1993), pp. 396–408.

Maisky diary, 7 May 1941, in Gabriel Gorodetsky (ed.), The Maisky Diaries: Red Ambassador to the Court of St. James, 1932–1943 (New Haven, CT, 2015), p. 353.

As in the previous war, Churchill was remarkably free of any visceral hatred of the enemy. At moments of intense pressure or under the impression of the damage wrought by German bombing, he might vent his anger in violent language – ‘[he] talks about castrating the lot’ – but these were exceptional. During the early days of the German air assault on Southern England, for instance, he told his private secretary with a touch of levity ‘that he had enjoyed a real “Hun-hate” with one of the Generals there [South Eastern area]. “I never hated the Germans in the last war, but now I hate them like…well, like an earwig.”.’ If there was some hesitation here, Churchill also had no very precise views on how this human species of Dermaptera was to be treated once the fighting had ended. The broad outlines, however, were clear. 1919 was a warning, he explained to the Cabinet after his first meeting with the American president at Placentia Bay in August 1941:

Colville diary, 20 September 1940 and 12 July 1940, in John Colville, The Fringes of Power: Downing Street Diaries, 1939–1955 (London, 1985), pp. 245 and 191–2. For a discussion of British attitudes towards Germany during the Second World War, see Carl-Christoph Schweitzer, ‘Britische Deutschlandbilder im Zweiten Weltkrieg’, in Gerhard A. Ritter and Peter Wende (eds), Rivalität und Partnerschaft: Studien zu den deutsch-britischen Beziehungen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert: Festschrift für Anthony J. Nicholls (Paderborn, 1999), pp. 203–27.

Then we spoke much of a “war to end war” and of a general organisation afterwards in which all were committed equally to disarm. On the other hand, we were full of ideas of making the Germans pay enormous reparations and of impoverishing them….
Now we look at things differently. We must disarm the Germans and their accomplices but give no undertaking, which they can afterwards exploit, that we shall give them within any measurable time any sort of equality as regards arms. […] On the other hand, we now take the view that impoverished nations are bound to be bad neighbours, and we wish to see everyone prosperous, including the Germans. In short, our aim is to make Germany “fat but impotent”.

Dalton diary, 26 August 1941, in Ben Pimlott (ed.), The Second World War Diaries of Hugh Dalton, 1940–1945 (London, 1986), p. 275. Dalton’s more diplomatic formula was ‘Work and wages but no weapons.’

There was no alternative but to acknowledge that ‘Germany was going to remain in the European family’. Churchill did ‘not believe in pariah nations’, and he was firm in his view that ‘[y]ou cannot indict a whole nation’. For that reason, he refused
to endorse Sir Robert Vansittart’s campaign of vilification of Germany. The country had ‘existed before the Gestapo’, and he attached the greatest importance to the terms ‘“Nazi tyranny” and “Prussian militarism”.’ Unlike Mussolini, ‘the bogus mimic of Ancient Rome’, whom he would have liked to see ‘strangled like Vercingetorix in old Roman fashion’, he was content to ‘segregate on some island’ the leading lights of the Hitler regime, ‘though he would not so desecrate St. Helena’.

Colville diary, 13 December 1940 and 8 March 1941, in Colville, Fringes of Power, pp. 312 and 363; and Moran diary, 13 September 1944, in Lord Moran, Winston Churchill: The Struggle for Survival, 1940–1965 (London, 1966), pp. 177–8.

Quotes from Colville diary, 13 December 1941, in Colville, Fringes of Power, p. 312, and Churchill to Vansittart, 7 January 1941 (as featured in TNA, Prime Minister’s Office papers PREM 34/23/2). See Robert Vansittart, Black Record: Germans Past and Present (London, 1941).

Colville diary, 9 July 1941, in Colville, Fringes of Power, 412.

Churchill was ready to leave the question of Germany’s future to be settled at the end of the war. This may be explained with his preoccupation with the pressing military needs of the moment. But it is significant that the war cabinet never discussed the future shape of Germany. Even when the demise of the Axis coalition hove into view with the collapse of Mussolini’s regime in July 1943, Churchill left it to Attlee as his deputy to chair the cabinet committee dealing with preparations for an armistice. For the most part, Eden and his officials at the Foreign Office had a free hand in devising various plans for Germany’s future, usually centred on federal ideas and including territorial losses in the East.

TNA, Cabinet Papers, CAB 65/35/WM (43) 107: War Cabinet conclusions, 29 July 1943. See also Jonathan Schneer, Ministers at War: Winston Churchill and His War Cabinet, 1940–1945 (London, 2015), pp. 209–10.

TNA, Foreign and Commonwealth Office records, FO 371/33457/C2863: e.g. memo. Jebb, ‘Some thoughts on the future of Germany’, 16 February 1943, which yielded Eden’s memo on ‘The future of Germany’, 8 March 1943. For a detailed discussion, see Lothar Kettenacker, Krieg zur Friedenssicherung: Die Deutschlandplanung der britischen Regierung während des Zweiten Weltkrieges (Göttingen, 1989), pp. 147–92 et passim.

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Churchill expressed his views on such matters mostly in asides in private conversations or in occasional minutes. These are nevertheless instructive in that they suggest an instinctive cleaving to antiquated precepts. After the war, he explained to his private secretary in December 1940, ‘he visualised five great nations: England, France, Italy, Spain and Prussia [!].’ In addition, there would be ‘four confederations: the Northern with its capital at The Hague; the Mitteleuropa, with its capital at Warsaw or Prague; the Danubian, consisting of Bavaria, Württemberg, Austria, Hungary, etc., with its capital at Vienna; and the Balkan with Turkey at its head and Constantinople as its capital’. These nine powers would join in a Council of Europe with ‘a supreme judiciary and a Supreme Economic Council to settle currency questions etc.’.  Two years later, a cabinet row over postwar relief for Europe, as Eden’s private secretary recorded, ‘provoked [Churchill] to the most obstreperous utterances. He said that the only way to run Europe was for G[rea]t Britain and Russia to keep out, and for Europe to be run by a Grand Council of “Great” Powers, including Prussia, Italy, Spain and a Scandinavian Confederacy.’ Superficially, this was an eccentric mixture of an older, essentially pre-1866, continent and a forward-looking, quasi-federal Europe. Its practicality struck professional diplomats as doubtful, and they frequently bristled at ‘another foolish minute’ by the prime minister: ‘He wishes to put the clock back to the Congress of Vienna. With Roosevelt straining to put the British Empire into liquidation and Winston pulling in the opposite direction to put it back to pre-Boer War, we are in danger of losing the Old and the New World.’ There was nevertheless an interesting parallel here with his attempts to revive some of the Edwardian, essentially New Liberalism, values to give
a sense of direction to the country as it emerged from years of collective endeavour in wartime.

Colville diary, 13 Dec. 1940, in Colville, Fringes of Power, pp. 312–13. Prussia was many things but never a nation in any meaningful sense of the word. For Churchill’s views on Germany, see also Gehard L. Weinberg, Visions of Victory: The Hopes of Eight World War II Leaders (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 150–3.

Harvey diary, 3 November 1942, in John Harvey (ed), The War Diaries of Oliver Harvey, 1941–1945 (London, 1978), p. 175.

Harvey diary, 23 October 1942, in ibid., p. 171.

Paul Addison, ‘Churchill in British politics, 1940–55’, in J. M. W. Bean (ed.), The Political Culture of Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Stephen Koss (London, 1987), pp. 243–61.

Churchill’s ‘pulling’ backwards may explain his peculiar fascination with Prussia. Notwithstanding his frequent references to ‘Prussian militarism’ – a well-established notion in British thinking since the previous war so much so that they two were well-nigh synonymous – there was a deep-seated respect for Prussia that reflected the historic achievements of Prussian kings but also the potential threat a Prussian state might pose. Both were factors that could not be ignored. During his summit with Stalin in Moscow in October 1944, for instance, he expounded at length on the need to reduce Germany’s industrial capacity: ‘After the war [Walther] Rathenau had told the Germans that being deprived of their army and navy would not matter; he promised to arrange factories and make new weapons. Brüning carried on this policy but no-one dared go into production until Hitler appeared. […] Hitler only pulled the lever. It should not happen again.’ As he and the Soviet leader pored over a map of Central Europe, the prime minister suggested that the Reich be divided into three states, a South German one with Austria, which would receive ‘soft treatment’, Prussia – destined for ‘hard treatment’ – possibly joined now by Saxony, and the industrial regions on Rhine and Ruhr which would be placed ‘under international control’.

TNA, Prime Minister’s Office papers, PREM 3/434/4: ‘Record of Meeting held at the Kremlin on the 17th October 1944, at 10 pm’. Churchill focused only on the territorial losses to Poland in his reports to Roosevelt, see tel. (no. 1227 Z/TOR 1512 Z, personal and top secret), 18 October 1944, in Warren Kimball (ed.), Churchill and Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence (3 vols., Princeton, NJ, 1984), pp. 360–1. See also John Charmley, Churchill’s Grand Alliance: The Anglo-American Special Relationship, 1940–1955 (London, 1995), pp. 104–9.

At the same time, he recognized that the old Junker elite had held out against the Hitler movement. It was with this in mind, and in the hope of galvanizing opposition amongst German generals that he had offered, in May 1940, the ex-Kaiser in his Dutch refuge ‘that if he should wish to seek asylum in England he would be treated with consideration & dignity’. The exiled emperor refused to be a pawn ‘in this political game of chess against Germany’, and Churchill let the matter drop. Nothing came of this, but as the war eventually approached its end, Churchill was conscious of the fact that Prussia, however configured, might yet prove its worth as a bulwark against the Soviet Union. The prime minister, noted a member of his entourage in late February 1945, ‘was rather depressed, thinking of the possibilities of Russia one day turning against us, saying that Chamberlain had trusted Hitler as he was now trusting Stalin’.

TNA, Foreign and Commonwealth Office records, FO 371/26571/C6440: Minute by Grey, 6 June 1941. See also Ilsemann diary, 12 May 1940, in Harald von Koenigswald (ed.), Der Kaiser in Holland: Aufzeichnungen des letzten Flügeladjutanten Kaiser Wilhelms II (2 vols., Munich, 1968) ii, p. 341.

Colville diary, 23 Feb. 1945, in Colville, Fringes of Power, 562. See also Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vii, Road to Victory, 1941–1945 (London, 1986), 1230–34.

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There was perhaps a whiff of the old regime about Churchill’s ideas on reordering the German lands, and his notion of catholic South Germany and Austria as untainted by Nazism was naive (all of the movement’s leaders from Hitler downwards, with the exception of Hermann Göring, were non-Prussians after all). No less striking was his failure to grasp the degree to which the British government, through the various agreements between the Big Three, was already committed to an outcome that, whatever its precise shape, left little scope for the sort of ideas Churchill ventilated until the end of the fighting. His replacement, in July 1945, by a man with a firmer grasp of detail, then, was not perhaps entirely accidental. Just as in Britain’s domestic affairs, it marked the passing of an age in international politics as well.

‘Back into the European family’: Churchill and post-war Germany
The year 1945 brought an end to the fighting in Europe. It did not bring a general European peace settlement. As the political temperature between the victorious allies plunged, the outcome of the war was frozen in the permafrost of the early Cold War. This naturally influenced Churchill’s views of Germany, but in their broad outlines they remained unchanged.
For now, Germany was an object of great power politics. In his Fulton speech in 1946, Churchill warned of the dangers inherent in Soviet attempts to establish ‘a proCommunist Germany’. Not only was this not in keeping with wartime arrangements between the Big Three, it also bore the seeds of renewed conflict: ‘the defeated Germans…[might put] themselves up for auction between the Soviets and the Western Democracies.…[T]his is certainly not the Liberated Europe we fought to build up. Nor is it one which contains the essential of permanent peace.’ Whatever political orientation postwar Germany might take, she could not be kept down. Churchill implicitly returned to this theme in a Commons debate on the Schuman Plan in the summer of 1950, by which time two separate German states had settled into mutual hostility. He criticized the Attlee government for not taking part in the Paris talks because it was ‘hostile to the movement towards European unity’. Holding aloof would rob Britain of influence while ‘matters of great consequence [were] being discussed in our absence’. More fundamentally, ‘[t]he absence of Britain deranges the balance of Europe’. Churchill wanted to see Germany received ‘back into the European family, but this implies … that Britain and France should in the main act together so as to be able to deal on even terms with Germany’. Without London’s participation, he prognosticated, ‘the coal and steel pool in Western Europe must naturally tend to be dominated by Germany, who will be the most powerful member’. Clearly, Churchill’s views had evolved since his Zürich speech in 1946, in which he had implied that Britain’s place would be outside any new European entity, and it explains perhaps why his private secretary later speculated that his former political master would have become a pro-European.

Churchill speech at Fulton, MO, 5 March 1946, in Churchill (ed.), Sinews of Peace, pp. 93–105. For the background, see Alan Watson, Churchill’s Legacy: Two Speeches to Save the World (London, 2016), pp. 23–82.

Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 5th ser. cdlxxvi (27 June 1950), cols. 2142, 2152 and 2153.

Sir John Colville, The Qualities of a Statesman (Zürich, 1978) (=12th Winston Churchill Memorial Lecture), pp. 10–11. For contrasting views, see M. Beloff to editor, The Times, 20 September 1996, and Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny (London, 2018), 899–900.

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Britain remained on the sidelines of Europe, but during his peacetime administration, Churchill encouraged West Germany’s contribution to Western defences, initially to the European Defence Community and, after its failure, to NATO: ‘It seems to me at this critical juncture a great opportunity has come to Germany to take her position among the leaders of free Europe.’ Ever since the end of the war, he later reflected, by then already retired from politics, he had done his ‘utmost to bring Germany back into the circle of the European family’. There could no stability in Europe unless Germany was firmly anchored in its security structures.

Tel. Churchill to Adenauer (top secret), 3 September 1954, encl. in Churchill to Eisenhower, 3 September 1954, as featured in Peter G. Boyle (ed.), The Churchill–Eisenhower Correspondence, 1953–1955 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1990), p. 170. See also John W. Young, ‘German rearmament and the European defence community’, in John W. Young (ed.), The Foreign Policy of Churchill’s Peacetime Administration, 1951–1955 (Leicester, 1988), pp. 81–108; and Hans-Peter Schwarz, Adenauer, ii, Der Staatsmann, 1952–1967 (Munich, 1991), pp. 144–53.

Churchill speech at Woodford, 20 Apr. 1959, as quoted in Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, viii, ‘Never Despair’, 1945– 1965 (London, 1988), 1291.

Churchill’s Germany
Winston Churchill’s relationship with Germany was of a special kind. As a model of a modern welfare state, the young and ambitious Liberal, anxious to make his name, found much to admire and emulate in that country. Yet, it was the Anglo-German naval race that established him as one of the leading politicians of his generation. War with Germany nearly wrecked his career and then, in its second incarnation, redeemed it and elevated him to the near-mythical figure of national saviour.

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Churchill’s views of Germany were profound but lacked nuance and depth of knowledge. Germany – his Germany – was part of that rich pageantry of European history that he saw before his mind’s eye. This Germany was perhaps more a romantic image than a crisply delineated and subtly shaded etching, a well-ordered country of great national vitality, significant future potential and with tremendous powers of organization, a country he respected and admired – and sometimes feared. Alongside this, there was Churchill’s fascination with Prussia as the embodiment of all that was best and worst in Germany. That kingdom, defunct since November 1918, also provided the historic link to Russia as the other Eastern great power. Much of Churchill’s thinking revolved around the key geopolitical nexus between Berlin and Moscow. It determined the stability of the European polity. Russia – whether that of the tsars or the commissars – was more distant and historically never able to dominate more than the Eastern half of the continent. By contrast, without Germany firmly integrated into Europe’s security architecture, there could be no peace. On this insight rested Churchill’s special relationship with Germany.
I am grateful to John H. Maurer, who really knows his Churchill, for his comments and suggestions.
^1 Notably at Fulton, MO, on 5 March 1946, as repr. in Randolph S. Churchill (ed.), The Sinews of Peace: Post-War Speeches by Winston S. Churchill (London, 1948), pp. 93–105. See also David Reynolds, From World War to Cold War: Churchill, Roosevelt, and the International History of the 1940s (Oxford, 2006), pp. 49–71; and Peter Clarke, Mr. Churchill’s Profession: The Statesman as Author and the Book That Defined the ‘Special Relationship’ (New York, 2012), p. 277.
^2 See also Allen Packwood’s introduction to this special issue.
^3 Gordon A. Craig’s apt comment, ‘Churchill and Germany’, in Robert Blake and Wm. Roger Louis (eds), Churchill: A Major New Assessment of His Life in Peace and War (Oxford, 1993), pp. 17–41, at p. 21. See also the recent Churchill und die Deutschen: Eine besondere Beziehung (Munich, 2024) by the journalist Dietmar Pieper.
^4 The literature is vast, of course, and this is not the place for an exhaustive historiographical discussion. It will suffice here to refer to Magnus Brechtken, ‘Personality, image and perception: Patterns and problems of Anglo-German relations in the 19th and 20th Centuries’, in Adolf M. Birke, Magnus Brechtken and Alaric Searle (eds), An Anglo- German Dialogue: The Munich Lectures on the History of International Relations (Munich, 2000), pp. 13–42; the locus classicus for the pre-1914 period, Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860–1914 (London, NJ, 1987); John Ramsden, Don’t Mention the War: The British and the Germans since 1890 (London, 2006); further the essays in Wolfgang J. Mommsen (ed.), Die ungleichen Partner: Deutsch-britische Beziehungen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1999); and for an explicitly cultural perspective, John Mander, Our German Cousins: Anglo- German Relations in the 19th and 20th Centuries (London, 1974).

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