Is the bbc beastly enough to fascists? (1) 1933-1934

The BBC that reported on Germany in 1933 and 1934 was a very different organisation from the BBC that later became famous for its fierce anti Nazi wartime output. To decide whether its coverage of the Nazi Party in those first two years of Hitler’s rule was neutral, sympathetic or critical, you have to begin with that institutional context and then look closely at a small number of identifiable broadcasts and printed texts. The surviving record is patchy, and detailed schedules or scripts often sit in the BBC’s Written Archives rather than online, so what follows is necessarily based on examples that have left a visible trace rather than a complete catalogue. I will be explicit where the evidence is strong and where I am inferring a pattern.

In 1933 the BBC was still a young monopoly broadcaster, dominated by John Reith’s idea that it should inform, educate and entertain the nation without becoming a partisan political actor. It did not yet have a modern news department. Radio news bulletins consisted mainly of agency copy from Reuters and the Press Association, edited and read aloud, and regular news bulletins on the National Programme only became an established part of the schedule in the early nineteen thirties. A dedicated news department only appeared in 1934, whose job was still essentially to select and shape material from existing wire services rather than to send out its own reporting teams. 

Talks and commentaries were handled by a separate Talks Department, whose first head, Hilda Matheson, had cultivated a progressive, intellectually ambitious but officially non partisan tone. She left in 1932 after clashes with Reith, at a time when the Corporation was becoming more cautious in anticipation of the Ullswater Committee’s review of its Charter. That committee’s very existence tended to encourage self censorship in the BBC, since the renewal of the Charter and the licence fee depended on government goodwill.  In practice this meant an internal culture that prized formal impartiality, obedience to rules about “no party politics”, and deference to the Foreign Office in the handling of sensitive international issues.

The basic political context of 1933 and 1934 in Germany can be summarised quickly. Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933, used the Reichstag Fire in February 1933 as a pretext to crush opposition, secured emergency powers through the Enabling Act, banned other parties, and began systematic persecution of Communists, Social Democrats and Jews. The Night of the Long Knives in June 1934 saw the murder of rivals within the Nazi movement and beyond, and made clear that the regime would use open violence to maintain control. These events were reported in the British press and in agency copy. The BBC almost certainly mentioned them in its news bulletins, simply because they were headline foreign stories, although we lack full transcripts for every bulletin. More revealing for your question are the interpretive talks and correspondents’ pieces that tried to “explain” Germany to British listeners.Two names stand out for the period 1933 to 1934. The first is Vernon Bartlett, already a well known foreign affairs commentator, whose talks from foreign capitals are explicitly mentioned in the BBC Year Book for 1934 as a distinctive kind of programme. 

The second is Richard Crossman, then a young Oxford don, who made his BBC debut in 1934 with a talk titled “Germany: The Inner Conflict” and then delivered a series of further broadcasts on German conditions while in the country. Both operated at the boundary between description and interpretation, and both raised awkward questions about how “neutral” the BBC really was.

Vernon Bartlett’s reporting from Berlin in 1933 is particularly important because we have several independent references to it. When the BBC and the British Library made the Listener archive available online, journalists drew attention to a piece Bartlett wrote from Berlin in March 1933, based on a radio report. The Guardian summarised the article in critical terms. Bartlett, it noted, wrote that nobody he had seen in Nazi Germany had “suffered any inconvenience”, and that the real problem lay in the failure of Britain, France and the United States to help “moderate Germans” after the First World War. The Treaty of Versailles, he suggested, had left Germany in a position of permanent inferiority that a “young and vigorous race” would inevitably resist. That passage is often quoted today because it now seems astonishingly complacent about the immediate consequences of Nazi rule. By March 1933 political opponents were already being beaten, imprisoned and in some cases killed. Yet Bartlett’s piece foregrounded German grievance, normal civic life and Allied responsibility for the situation. There is no sign that the BBC treated this as improper at the time. On the contrary, Bartlett was one of its star foreign commentators, and his talks from foreign capitals were advertised as a hallmark of the service in the 1934 Year Book. 

From the Corporation’s point of view, he was giving listeners a calm, informed view of events on the ground. From a present day perspective, the effect was to treat Nazi rule as a regrettable but understandable response to Versailles, and to downplay the terror that was already under way.The second key Bartlett moment in 1933 was his broadcast on Germany’s withdrawal from the League of Nations and the disarmament conference in October. A doctoral study of interwar broadcasting notes that a talk on the League was carried at nine o’clock in the evening on 14 October 1933, in Bartlett’s usual slot after the news. Secondary accounts of the BBC’s relationship with the Foreign Office confirm that this broadcast sparked a major row. Bryan Haworth’s article on the BBC, Nazi Germany and the Foreign Office, 1933 to 1936, in the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television describes how the Foreign Office regarded Bartlett’s treatment of German grievances about disarmament as too sympathetic and politically unhelpful.

David Deacon’s study of the BBC and the Spanish Civil War, which looks back to 1933 for context, notes that the Foreign Office was incensed when Bartlett suggested that “Germany was justified in feeling aggrieved” about its treatment under the post war settlement. Biographical sketches of Bartlett add a further detail, probably drawn from his own memoirs. Wikipedia and other reference compilations record that his BBC contract was not renewed after his coverage of Hitler’s decision to leave the League of Nations was judged by BBC management and ministers to be too sympathetic. One internal characterisation repeated in later summaries is that his treatment of Germany had not been “beastly enough”. 

The same story appears in more popular, and politically tendentious, retellings which quote Bartlett as having implored “all lovers of peace” to trust Hitler’s sincerity when he said that a free Germany would be a peaceful one. Those later retellings need to be handled with care, since they are often written by openly pro Nazi authors, but the core claim that his talk urged listeners to take Hitler at his word is consistent with the Foreign Office’s complaint that the broadcast undercut British diplomatic leverage.

If we ask whether Bartlett's body of work was neutral, the answer depends on what we mean by neutrality. In formal terms Bartlett did not speak as a party political figure, he did not instruct listeners to support a specific British party, and he often stressed his wish to avoid hysteria. Within the BBC’s own rules he could easily be presented as an impartial expert, offering balanced analysis of German policy. Yet in practice his framing of events accepted several key elements of Nazi propaganda: that Germany had been uniquely humiliated by Versailles, that Hitler was primarily interested in redressing legitimate grievances, and that foreign powers risked war if they failed to recognise the “sincerity” of his peaceful assurances. When you combine those assumptions with the minimisation of domestic repression in early reports from Berlin, the overall effect was not neutral in the ordinary language sense. It encouraged listeners to see the new regime as a severe but understandable response to injustice, and it gave much less attention to those who were already being persecuted inside Germany.

The institution’s response makes this clearer. The Foreign Office was not complaining that Bartlett had been too critical of Hitler, but that he had gone beyond what ministers considered a safe or useful amount of sympathy. Reith and his colleagues were caught between two conceptions of neutrality. One came from their Charter obligations and Reith’s own ideals, which emphasised distance from day to day party conflict and a duty to inform the public about world events in an educated, measured tone. The other came from the British state’s foreign policy needs, which in 1933 still aimed to manage and conciliate Germany. When Bartlett’s tone coincided with that second aim, by explaining and partly legitimising German complaints, he was welcomed and praised. When, in October 1933, his words seemed to undermine British bargaining power by going further than ministers were prepared to go in public, his work became a problem and his contract was allowed to lapse. The content had not suddenly become more sympathetic than it had been in March, but its usefulness to Whitehall had changed.

Richard Crossman’s 1934 broadcasts provide a different but related case. Crossman was a young classicist at Oxford with a growing interest in contemporary politics. In April 1934 he travelled to Nazi Germany and observed the consolidation of the new regime at first hand. His first broadcast, titled “Germany: The Inner Conflict”, was carried on the BBC National Programme on 7 June 1934 and then printed in The Listener on 13 June. Scholarly commentary on this talk stresses that Crossman set out to describe the appeal of National Socialism to ordinary Germans, not simply to denounce it. One historian of classical reception notes that he “sought to outline the appeal of National Socialism to Germans”, using his training to draw analogies with ancient political forms. 

The Warwick Modern Records Centre, which holds Crossman’s papers, describes his 1934 broadcasts on Germany as marked by “objective detachment and curiosity”. He treated his subjects, including young Nazis he met, not as pure enemies, but as people whose motives had to be understood in their own terms. Another surviving talk text from the same period, “The German Scene”, includes vivid remarks attributed to a young Nazi who insisted that it was not right for him to criticise his leaders, which Crossman uses to illuminate the psychological transformation of political life under the new regime. Later, in 1940, he would give a talk titled “The Nazi Way”, recalling the night of terror of 30 June 1934, the Night of the Long Knives, which makes clear how far his attitude had shifted as violence escalated. 

Crossman’s 1934 work therefore sits between Bartlett’s partially sympathetic explanations and the more openly anti Nazi tone of later BBC wartime output. On the one hand he clearly recognised that something profoundly disturbing was happening in Germany. By the time he was broadcasting, the regime’s brutality was harder to overlook, and there is evidence in his later autobiographical reflections that he came to see his earlier sympathies as naive. On the other hand, his BBC talks in 1934 were framed as an attempt to understand and even to some extent to “explain away” Nazi enthusiasm. They sought to make sense of how a modern industrial society could rally around such a movement. For a British audience in 1934 this was both enlightening and, perhaps, dangerously normalising. Instead of hearing continuous moral condemnation, they heard a thoughtful, Oxford voiced analysis of the “inner conflict” in Germany, in which National Socialism could be treated as a misguided but intelligible response to social and national tensions.

From the point of view of BBC policy, Crossman’s 1934 broadcasts were easier to defend as neutral than Bartlett’s League of Nations talk. They did not, so far as we know, endorse specific German policies, and they did not explicitly urge the British public to support or resist any particular diplomatic move. They adhered closely to the “no party politics” rule and avoided direct attacks on British ministers. Yet, like Bartlett’s work, they were shaped by a wider climate in which British elites remained committed to the policy that later became known as appeasement. Explaining Nazi Germany as a complex inner conflict, and giving some weight to the grievances and enthusiasms of its supporters, fitted that climate better than a stark portrayal of the regime as criminal from the outset.If we widen the lens beyond these named commentators, BBC coverage of the Nazi Party and Germany in 1933 and 1934 included several other elements, although the level of detail that can be recovered without archival work is limited.

First, there were the straight news bulletins, which reported major political developments in Germany in a sober, uninflected style. Because the BBC relied on wire services and saw itself as a national institution, its announcers cultivated what one later memoir described as a voice that was “steady, correct, just a voice without emotion, and his announcements were precisely right in every detail, cold and without feeling”. Stuart Hibberd and other newsreaders did not add comment. Neutrality in this context meant adopting the speaking style of an impartial civil service rather than a campaigning newspaper. That style, combined with the limited duration of bulletins and formal deference to foreign governments, tended to flatten the moral content of events. The Reichstag Fire, for example, would have been read out as a factual report of a blaze and subsequent arrests, without any suggestion that the accusations against Communists were manufactured, and without voices from victims.

Second, there was The Listener, a weekly magazine founded in 1929 to print edited versions of talks and to carry essays related to BBC programmes. It was here that Bartlett’s Berlin piece appeared in 1933, and where Crossman’s “Germany: The Inner Conflict” was printed in 1934. The magazine extended the life and reach of broadcasts and gave them a quasi literary authority. Articles about Germany in these years therefore belonged to a hybrid genre, half spoken talk and half print essay. The Listener was not formally a BBC house organ, but it very much reflected the Corporation’s sense of itself as a national educator. As a result, its treatment of Nazi Germany often sought to rise above immediate journalistic scandal and to offer a broader “understanding”, which, again, could translate into coolness about the sufferings of those targeted by the regime.

Third, year books and institutional publications framed BBC foreign coverage in general terms. The BBC Year Book for 1933 and 1934 did not list individual German reports in detail, but they did describe the types of foreign programmes on offer. The 1934 instalment, for example, groups foreign affairs talks into categories such as regular diplomatic commentaries, special topical talks, and what it calls “Vernon Bartlett’s talks from foreign capitals”.  This formula placed Bartlett’s work alongside other geographically themed talks and signalled that the Corporation saw him as an exemplary foreign voice. It tells you something about the BBC’s understanding of neutrality that a commentator whose coverage of Nazi Germany and the League of Nations was soon judged by the Foreign Office to have been too sympathetic was nonetheless held up in internal publications as a model practitioner.Finally, the BBC’s relationship to the Foreign Office and the wider British state provides an essential part of the picture. Haworth’s article on the Corporation, Nazi Germany and the Foreign Office in the years 1933 to 1936 shows that officials in the Foreign Office monitored and tried to influence the tone of BBC coverage of Germany. The Bartlett affair in October 1933 led to detailed correspondence about the future handling of German topics and helped to establish a pattern in which the BBC accepted informal guidance on international broadcasting in order to protect its Charter and to avoid more direct control.

Later work on British wartime radio propaganda, such as Seul’s study of the BBC German Service, emphasises that by the end of the decade officials had concluded that the best response to Nazi propaganda was persistent, accurate news coverage. In 1933 and 1934 that conclusion had not yet been reached. The priority was still to combine “plain, unvarnished news” with a cautious, non provocative commentary style that would not upset the German government or domestic political balances.

Putting these pieces together, we can now return to the central question. Was BBC coverage of Germany, and of the Nazi Party, beastly enough in 1933 and 1934? At the level of declared principle and institutional self image, the answer is no. The BBC’s leadership sincerely believed that broadcasting must avoid partisan domestic politics and must present foreign affairs in a measured, informed manner. It relied on agency copy for its news, which it treated as a neutral factual base, and it insisted that talks should be scripted, edited and delivered in a decorous style that avoided inflammatory language. Commentators like Bartlett and Crossman were chosen precisely because they sounded authoritative rather than sensationalist, and because they could frame complex foreign developments in ways that an educated British audience would find intelligible.

At the level of actual content and effect, however, the answer is much more complicated. Two structural biases shaped the BBC’s treatment of Nazi Germany in 1933 and 1934. First, there was a bias towards the official British foreign policy of the time, which aimed to revise aspects of Versailles and to bring Germany back into a cooperative European framework. Explaining and to some extent legitimising German grievances fitted this policy. Condemning Hitler outright as a criminal from the moment he took power did not. Bartlett’s early Berlin piece and his October 1933 talk accepted much of the Nazi narrative about Versailles and about the need for equality in armaments. Crossman’s 1934 talk on the inner conflict in Germany presented National Socialism as an understandable, if dangerous, response to social and national tensions rather than as a straightforward conspiracy of gangsters. The BBC did not require them to endorse the Nazi Party, but it did encourage their shared effort to treat it as something that could be rationally accommodated and perhaps tamed. 

Second, there was a bias inherent in the Corporation’s cultural position as the voice of an imperial, upper middle class Britain. Its announcers and talk givers spoke in accents and idioms associated with authority. Their default approach to foreign upheavals was to look for order and continuity. Violence and repression were often treated as regrettable but temporary disturbances, or as excesses that might be corrected once reasonable grievances were met. That mindset made it easier for early BBC commentators to treat Nazi brutality as an aberration within an otherwise modern, vigorous German nation, rather than as the core of the new regime’s identity. It also made them more likely to empathise with German elites and with the frustrations of a proud middle class, and less likely to identify with Communists, Social Democrats, Jews or others who were being singled out for persecution.

Neutrality in the narrow sense of not endorsing a British political party, and of not engaging in explicit propaganda, was maintained. Neutrality in the broader sense of giving listeners a clear and morally proportionate understanding of what was happening in Germany was not. Early BBC coverage of the Nazi Party was constrained by deference to the Foreign Office, by a policy climate that still saw conciliation as desirable, and by an elite culture that was slow to appreciate the radical nature of the Nazi project. The result was a body of reporting and commentary in 1933 and 1934 that often treated the Nazi seizure of power as a normal, if rough, change of government, and the new regime’s claims as potentially sincere. 

Only later, as events such as the Night of the Long Knives made the violence impossible to file away as a temporary excess, did voices like Crossman’s become more sharply critical and the BBC begin to move towards the more adversarial stance that characterised its wartime German Service. So the fairest verdict is that the BBC aspired to neutrality but, in the decisive first years of Nazi rule, its coverage was neither simply neutral nor consistently critical. It was, rather, a cautious, establishment account that mixed factual reporting with explanatory commentary which tended, on balance, to normalise the Nazi regime and to understate both its ideological extremity and its immediate human cost.

Not beastly at all!