is the bbc beastly enough to fascists (3): 1937-1938

By 1937 and 1938 the BBC’s relationship to Nazi Germany had entered a new phase. At home, its domestic services were still trying to sound like the impartial voice of a measured, upper middle class Britain. Abroad, the Corporation was being drawn, quite deliberately, into Neville Chamberlain’s attempt to use radio as an instrument of appeasement. Those two roles did not sit easily together. The question is whether, across those two years, BBC output on Germany was neutral in any meaningful sense, or whether it became a vehicle for Chamberlain’s particular reading of events.

When Chamberlain became prime minister in 1937 he inherited both an appeasement policy that had been evolving since 1933 and a broadcasting system whose independence was already limited by informal restraints. The Foreign Office and Cabinet had forced the BBC to cancel controversial foreign affairs talks in 1935 and 1936 when these clashed with diplomatic needs, something Adamthwaite’s study of government and the media in 1937 and 1938 treats as an established pattern rather than an occasional aberration. At the same time, historians of appeasement note that the BBC, alongside The Times, publicly endorsed Chamberlain’s general approach to Hitler, presenting his policy of concessions and negotiation as the responsible way to avoid another war. Inside the BBC, domestic news was still built around anonymous announcers reading agency copy whose ownership was carefully recited at the start of each bulletin. Accounts of pre war practice talk about the familiar opening that credited Reuters, the Press Association and the rest, followed by an impersonal and rather dull list of items.

Announcers such as Stuart Hibberd and Alvar Liddell became associated with this style, which prized steadiness and the avoidance of visible emotion. It was a style that could be sold as neutral, but it also made it hard to signal to listeners that some stories were morally or politically more urgent than others. In 1937, most of what the BBC said about Germany came through those bulletins and through foreign affairs talks that treated Nazi policy as one of several European problems competing for attention with Spain, Italy, Japan and the empire. The Hossbach memorandum, the inner planning document in which Hitler sketched out his long term war aims, was not public at the time. What British officials and broadcasters had instead were Hitler’s speeches, his visible foreign policy moves, and the broad understanding that he wanted to revise Versailles. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s overview of appeasement stresses that British leaders, including Chamberlain, believed that they could negotiate with Hitler in good faith and that making concessions on issues like German minorities in neighbouring states might secure peace. BBC commentators took that assumption for granted.

At the same moment, the Spanish Civil War was already forcing the Corporation to define its stance on European violence more sharply. David Deacon’s study of the BBC and Spain describes what he calls a quietening effect: the Foreign Office and Cabinet pressed the Corporation to tone down or avoid material that might encourage strong feelings about fascism and anti fascism, and the BBC complied. The same logic applied by default to Germany. Talks that might have presented Nazism as part of a single fascist threat with Italy could not be allowed to tip into overt criticism of Italian policy while Mussolini was still a hoped for partner in European diplomacy. So Germany tended to be discussed in a strictly diplomatic frame, as one case among many in which grievances about Versailles and minority populations had to be managed.

Because individual scripts from 1937 are mostly buried in the Written Archives, I cannot produce a full catalogue of programmes. What I can do is reconstruct, in cautious outline, the kinds of Germany related items that British listeners would have heard. There were regular news bulletins in which announcers read agency copy about Hitler’s speeches, German economic policy, and episodes in the ongoing arms race. These would have noted, for example, German reactions to British rearmament and to debates in the League of Nations, all in the same flat tone as domestic economic news. There were also foreign affairs talks in which invited experts discussed “The European situation” or “Germany and Central Europe” for a quarter of an hour at a time. Scripted and edited to avoid party politics, these talks tended to describe Nazi foreign policy as bold and risky but not necessarily irrational. The general impression offered to listeners was that of a dangerous but possibly manageable Germany, led by a man who made dramatic speeches but who could perhaps be contained by careful negotiation.

The result in 1937 was a kind of neutrality that was already tilted. Neither domestic party critics of appeasement nor anti fascist voices from the left had any systematic place on the air. Listeners heard Cabinet ministers expounding their own decisions, foreign affairs pundits who broadly shared elite assumptions, and news bulletins that framed events as an ongoing diplomatic problem rather than a moral emergency.

In 1938 that pattern persisted but the stakes rose sharply. In March Hitler annexed Austria in the Anschluss, in open breach of the Treaty of Versailles and the principles of the League. British newspapers carried alarmed coverage and photographs of German troops crossing the border and entering Vienna. In radio terms, however, there is good evidence that the most vivid accounts came not from the BBC but from American correspondents such as Edward Murrow and William Shirer, whose more personal style left listeners in no doubt about what was happening. The Guardian’s retrospective on radio and Czechoslovakia makes the point that American audiences were paradoxically better informed than many Europeans, precisely because their broadcasters were freer to be descriptive and openly worried.

The BBC’s bulletin on the Anschluss would have followed the familiar formula. It reported that German troops had entered Austria, that Chancellor Schuschnigg had resigned, that plebiscites were promised, that reactions in London and Paris were being considered. The voice was calm, the words were lifted from agency reports. From the BBC’s point of view this was merely the application of its existing standards of neutrality. From another angle it was an understatement of a massive act of aggression, framed as if it were just another international story. All of this might still have resembled the pattern of 1935 and 1936, but in the second half of 1938 something new happened. Chamberlain’s handling of the Sudeten crisis and the Munich negotiations led the British government to establish, almost overnight, a German language service of the BBC, the Londoner Rundfunk.

Until September 1938, as the BBC Calling history of the External Services puts it, there was no systematic service of European broadcasting from London. When the crisis over Czechoslovakia escalated, a rapid decision was taken to address the German public directly by radio.

On 27 September 1938, shortly after Chamberlain had broadcast in English to the British nation from London, British listeners suddenly heard a new sound. A history of the German Service describes how, that evening, after the prime minister’s address, a German voice began to speak over the BBC’s domestic frequencies. Many British listeners, who did not expect to hear foreign languages on their sets, were startled. What they were hearing was the first improvised broadcast of the German Service. The German language Wikipedia entry for Londoner Rundfunk and other reconstructions agree on the basic details. At Chamberlain’s request, the BBC transmitted a German translation of his speech to the British people so that it could be heard inside the Reich. The translation was made by an Austrian journalist, Robert Lucas, and read by Walter Goetz, a German born artist and caricaturist who had little broadcasting experience. Chamberlain’s message stressed his continuing hope for a peaceful settlement, his reluctance to go to war, and his insistence that if peace could not be preserved under tolerable conditions then life would become unliveable for those who believed in freedom.

Immediately after Goetz had finished reading the speech, there was a short news bulletin in German, introduced by the now famous words “Hier spricht London”. The whole improvised broadcast used the domestic BBC’s wavelengths, which confused some British listeners, but the real target was the German audience that might be listening on short wave or medium wave. The aim, as later summaries by Stephanie Seul and others make clear, was explicitly political. Chamberlain hoped that by speaking over the heads of the Nazi leadership directly to the German people, he could strengthen those who, in his imagination, wanted peace, and thereby help to avert war.

That first German broadcast on 27 September was still, in a sense, an extension of domestic coverage. It was Chamberlain’s own view of the crisis, translated and carried abroad by the BBC. Two days later, when he returned from Munich with the agreement that ceded the Sudetenland to Germany, the domestic BBC again gave him a dominant platform. The famous speeches at Heston aerodrome and outside Downing Street, in which he talked of peace with honour and declared that he believed there was peace for our time, were carried by the Corporation as national events. There was no equivalent air time for critics such as Churchill, whose speech in the Commons a few days later denounced the Munich settlement as a total and unmitigated defeat.

In print, his words could be read by anyone who sought them out in Hansard or the newspapers. On the radio, however, the dominant sound was the prime minister’s assurance that war had been avoided and that his policy had been vindicated. The Guardian’s later comment that Chamberlain went out of his way to ensure that the British public was not fully informed about the complexities of the Czechoslovak situation is borne out by this pattern of broadcasting.

From the point of view of being beastly to fascists, this is a crucial turning point. Up to this point one could still argue that the BBC’s neutral tone was simply an institutional habit. After Munich, the Corporation was being used quite directly as the mouthpiece of a particular policy line, both domestically and abroad. That does not mean that every BBC journalist became a propagandist overnight, but it does mean that the structural balance of voices on the air tilted even further towards the government. The new German Service institutionalised that tilt. As Seul’s work on “plain, unvarnished news” shows, the Chamberlain government and the BBC agreed that the most effective way to influence German opinion was to provide accurate and apparently impartial news about international affairs, interspersed with commentaries that highlighted Britain’s peaceful intentions and reasonable attitude. This was, in their view, both more credible and more in tune with the BBC’s self image than crude propaganda. Internally, officials spoke of the need for broadcasts in German to sound like straight news bulletins. The propagandistic element lay in what was selected, how topics were framed, and in the repetition of certain themes about Britain’s desire for peace.

Late in 1938 another event forced both British and German language broadcasting to confront Nazi violence more directly. On the night of 9 to 10 November, the regime organised what became known as Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, a coordinated wave of attacks on Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues across Germany and Austria. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s account notes that hundreds of Jews were killed or driven to suicide, thousands of synagogues and shops were destroyed and tens of thousands of men were sent to concentration camps. British newspapers carried shocking photographs and eye witness reports in the following days. Domestic BBC news bulletins inevitably reported the events, since they were impossible to ignore. Given the Corporation’s established practice, these reports would have emphasised the scale of property damage and arrests and the international reactions that followed, including protests and the recall of ambassadors. Again, however, the style of presentation would have been flat and official, avoiding emotive language even when describing what were, objectively, pogroms.In the German language sphere, Seul’s work on the representation of the Holocaust in British propaganda notes that the British campaign towards the German public began in earnest with the crisis of September 1938 and that from Kristallnacht onward the persecution of Jews became a recurring theme, though not as central as one might assume.

Internal memoranda worried that explicit references to Jews on the wireless might be a double edged weapon, which could backfire if antisemitic prejudices among listeners were activated rather than challenged. The result was that early German Service broadcasts in late 1938 did report anti Jewish measures, including the November pogrom and subsequent legislation that stripped Jews of property and civil rights, but they did so intermittently and often in a matter of fact tone that subordinated Jewish suffering to broader arguments about Nazi lawlessness and the danger posed by the regime to Europe as a whole. The primary aim was still to influence Germans against Hitler and to support British foreign policy, not to offer a comprehensive moral reckoning with antisemitism.

By the end of 1938, then, BBC output on Germany consisted of two overlapping layers. The first was the domestic Home and National Programmes, with their familiar news bulletins and occasional talks, which continued to present events such as the Anschluss, Munich and Kristallnacht in a neutral sounding, government aligned fashion. The second was the emerging German Service, formally part of the External Services, which had been born as an instrument of Chamberlain’s appeasement policy and operated under detailed guidance from the Foreign Office and Downing Street.

From the BBC’s own perspective, neutrality was still a core value. Managers and producers saw themselves as providing factual, sober information, especially in contrast to the blatant propaganda of Nazi radio. Stephanie Seul’s phrase “plain, unvarnished news” captures the ideal that guided the German Service, and something very similar guided domestic news as well. It mattered a great deal, internally, that BBC bulletins were accurate, properly sourced and free of party labels.

From the outside, and from a later standpoint, neutrality looks more compromised. Several overlapping pressures pulled the Corporation’s German output away from any balanced assessment. First, the government’s control over the range of permissible views was stronger than ever. Adamthwaite’s work on 1937 and 1938 underlines that Cabinet and Foreign Office were willing to intervene directly when broadcasts threatened to complicate policy, and that the BBC usually backed down. Government pressure to restrict criticism of appeasement on radio, identified in general terms by the standard account of appeasement, was highly effective. Second, the Corporation’s new role in German language broadcasting tied it even more closely to Chamberlain’s strategy. Seul’s thesis on appeasement and propaganda, and her later article, show that the German Service was created not as an independent journalistic venture but as one component in a wider propaganda campaign towards the German public, designed in detail in Whitehall. Journalists in the service found themselves, as one of Seul’s chapter titles puts it, in the service of British foreign policy.

Third, both domestic and foreign language output adopted a perspective in which Czechoslovakia and its citizens were marginal. The Guardian’s critique that Chamberlain helped ensure that Czechs and Sudeten Germans remained people of whom we know nothing is supported by the balance of programming. Listeners heard a great deal from Chamberlain, from British diplomats and from general commentators on European affairs. They heard almost nothing directly from Czechoslovak politicians or citizens, except perhaps filtered through news agency dispatches. In that sense, the BBC reproduced the central blind spot of appeasement.

Finally, when it came to persecution of Jews, both domestic and German language broadcasting underplayed the issue relative to its moral weight. Seul’s analysis of wartime propaganda shows that even once the Holocaust was under way, references to Jews were limited and tactically calculated. In 1938 that pattern was already forming. Kristallnacht was reported, but mainly as one more piece of evidence that the Nazi regime was brutal and unpredictable, rather than as a defining crime in itself.

The picture is therefore mixed in a by now familiar way. The BBC maintained neutrality in its own narrow, procedural sense. It avoided overt party politics at home, it spoke in calm tones, it presented itself as correcting rumour with fact. Yet in substance it largely endorsed Chamberlain’s view of Germany, and in structure it gave far more airtime to supporters of appeasement than to critics. By 1937 and 1938 the BBC had moved from being a cautious observer of Nazi Germany to being, in important respects, a participant in Chamberlain’s attempt to manage Hitler by negotiation and by appeal to German public opinion. The Corporation continued to believe it was neutral, because it maintained a certain tone and avoided domestic party conflict. In practice its treatment of Germany was shaped from above by appeasement, and from within by a professional culture that preferred calm explanation to sharp warning.