The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [52]
In the complicated maelstrom of fury and resentment that made up Adolf Hitler’s political philosophy, hatred against Britain was hardly present, at least until the British behaved so illogically as to refuse his peace offer, dropped over Britain in mid-July 1940 in leaflet form and entitled ‘A Last Appeal to Reason’. Nothing in the National Socialist canon prescribed war against the Reich’s fellow Anglo-Saxon empire, and references in Mein Kampf to the British were in general highly complimentary. ‘How hard it is to best England’, Hitler wrote, ‘we Germans have sufficiently learned… I, as a man of Germanic blood, would, in spite of everything, rather see India under British rule than any other.’5 In direct contrast to perceptions of national stereotype, when it came to the projected invasion it was the British who were ruthlessly efficient and the Germans who attempted to muddle through haphazardly. Because Nazi ideology did not call for the invasion of Britain – in the way that it called for that of Poland for racial reasons, France for revanchism and eventually Russia for Lebensraum – the Nazis and the OKW had failed to plan coherently for Operation Sealion.
Even during the campaign against France, Hitler had spoken of his ‘admiration of the British Empire, of the necessity for its existence, and of the civilization that Britain had brought into the world’, saying of the ‘harsh’ measures that Britain had employed in creating it: ‘Where there is planing, there are shavings flying.’6 He went on to tell his Staff officers General Rundstedt, General Georg von Sodenstern and Colonel Günther Blumentritt that the English were an essential element of stability in the world – along with the Catholic Church – and that he would offer troops to Britain to help her keep her colonies. Small wonder, therefore, that he did not exert himself to make Sealion a reality. ‘He showed little interest in the plans,’ recalled Blumentritt after the war, ‘and made no effort to speed up the preparations. That was utterly different to his usual behaviour.’7 His love-hate relationship with Britain, curiously reminiscent of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s, is also clear from Mein Kampf and must partly explain his lack of energy in attempting invasion in 1940.
An indication of how slapdash the Nazi plans for the subjugation of Britain were is provided in the Sonderfahndungsliste G.B. (Special Search List for Great Britain) drawn up by Walter Schellenberg, head of the counter-espionage unit of the Directorate of Reich Security, the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Head Office of Reich Security, or RSHA). This document, known as the ‘Black Book’, listed the 2,820 Britons and European exiles who were to be ‘taken into protective custody’ after the invasion. Of course it included Churchill – whose address was given as Westerham in Kent, as if he would be quietly waiting there for the Germans to call – but also writers such as H. G. Wells, E. M. Forster, Vera Brittain and Stephen Spender. (When the list was published after the war, one of those featured on it, the writer Rebecca West, telegraphed another, Noël Coward, to say, ‘My dear, the people we should have been seen dead with!’) Yet the Black Book was out of date before it was even printed: Sigmund Freud and Lytton Strachey had both died, the latter a full eight years earlier, and it featured others who were no longer living in Britain such as Aldous Huxley, who had been in America since 1936; Colonel Kenneth Strong, the former military attaché in