Pacifist Attitudes to Nazi Germany, 1936-45

Abstract

The subject of this article is the strikingly equivocal nature of the Peace Pledge Union's (PPU) views of Hitlerite Germany for most of the period which elapsed between its foundation in May 1936 and the end of the second world war. With the exception of Action, the journal of the British Union of Fascists, it is hard to think of another British newspaper which was so consistent an apologist for nazi Germany as Peace News, the PPU'S official mouthpiece. Beginning with its coverage of the Anschluss, or union of Austria with Germany, which Hitler enforced in March 1938, Peace News regularly went to extraordinary lengths to present the German case before British public opinion, on occasion going so far as to permit its contributors to peddle German propaganda as unvarnished fact. These assertions may well seem deliberately iconoclastic. At first sight, pacifism, with its emphasis on the inadmissability of violent solutions to political problems, would appear to be the ideological converse of a warlike creed like National Socialism. The PPU itself, moreover, is associated in the public mind with two figures whose personal sanctity is not in doubt: George Lansbury, who became identified with the PPU after his pacifism caused him to lose the leadership of the Labour Party in 1935, and the Reverend Dick Sheppard, a high-born and greatly gifted clergyman who gave the PPU inspirational leadership until his untimely death in October 1937. The first task of this article, therefore, is to illustrate beyond question that apologist tendencies were widespread among the PPU'S leading intellectuals and writers. Its second task is to enquire why and how this perplexing state of affairs arose. The PPU was officially born in May 1936, but previously there had been a lengthy period of gestation. In October 1934, at the height of the public revulsion against war and militarism caused by the failure of the 1932-4 League of Nations Conference on Disarmament,