Coffee with Hitler: The British Amateurs Who Tried to Civilise the Nazis

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Perhaps the peak of British-German positive relations under this “amateur diplomacy” came in September 1936 when Philip Conwell-Evans accompanied David Lloyd George, a former PM much admired by Hitler, on a trip to Berchtesgaden. There Hitler discussed with Lloyd George his well-known Faustian pact; in return for his recognizing the vital interests of the British Empire, England should accept German hegemony on the continent, which was necessary for her to maintain a “proper standard of life for her people.” As with earlier British visitors, Hitler fixated on the “disintegrating force” of Bolshevist ideology which threatened the existence of the nations states of Europe, comparable to the Muhammadan invasion. Every time Russia had been mentioned Lloyd George later told another associate, Hitler’s “lips began to twitch convulsively,”and soon he would be “shouting again, all but foaming at the mouth.” In this terrific debut, historian Charles Spicer genuinely enriches and deepens our understanding of the Thirties – the all-important decade in which the great and the good of these islands, scarred to the depths of their souls by the Great War, struggled to avoid a second global conflict."

Coffee with Hitler tells the astounding story of how a handful of amateur British intelligence agents wined, dined, and befriended the leading National Socialists between the wars. With support from royalty, aristocracy, politicians, and businessmen, they hoped to use the recently founded Anglo-German Fellowship as a vehicle to civilize and enlighten the Nazis. In Coffee With Hitler Spicer depicts the efforts of Tennant, Conwell-Evans and Christie to form an effective alliance with key German leaders, despite ever-increasing evidence of Nazi treachery and a British government firmly entrenched in an appeasement mindset. Spicer also describes how AGF connections quietly gathered valuable intelligence from Germany’s resistance leaders before World War II, carefully noting the AGF was not a pro-Nazi group, but rather a well-meaning, pro-Germany organization. In addition, Spicer reveals the eventual deterioration of the Anglo-German relationship and how Nazi leaders’ ambitions and obsession with Lebensraum (“living space”) led to the inevitable outbreak of war. Charles Spicer’s “Coffee With Hitler” has the cover and characters of an Alan Furst novel, but it is a true story of double-dealers and shifting shades of gray. The book follows three principal figures. Philip Conwell-Evans was a tailor’s son and socialist intellectual from Wales. Ernest Tennant was a butterfly-collecting Old Etonian from a “fantastically wealthy” Scottish family with ties to the chemicals industry and the City of London. Grahame Christie was a World War I fighter ace and a former attaché at the British embassies in Berlin and Washington. Between 1935 and the outbreak of war in September 1939, these “well-intentioned obscure middle-aged” Britons befriended the senior Nazi leadership and lobbied their own government in an effort to avoid another global conflagration.

Drawing on newly discovered primary sources, Charles Spencer sheds light on the early career of Kim Philby, Winston Churchill’s approach to appeasement, the US entry into the war and the Rudolf Hess affair, in a groundbreaking reassessment of Britain's relationship with Nazi Germany. As the result of multiple restrictions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles after World War I, Germany’s economy suffered during the 1920s and ’30s, creating resentment among German citizens and fertile ground for the rise of Nazism. Well aware of the vast toll another war would wreak upon society, three perceptive Englishmen—Ernest Tennant, Philip Conwell-Evans and Grahame Christie—sought to avert another world war through the formation of the exclusive Anglo-German Fellowship (AGF) and its German sister organization, the Deutsch-Englische Gesellschaft (DEG). AGF’s intent was to develop civilized friendships and political and economic connections with German leaders, including Nazi Party members such as Hermann Göring, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Rudolf Hess and even Adolf Hitler. Unfortunately, this infiltration was not a one-way street. While many, even most, of the British members of the Anglo-German Fellowship were Germanophiles rather than Nazi sympathisers, there was a fine line between cultural appreciation of the country’s literature and art and the more ambiguous ideas expressed by such shadowy figures as the historian TP Conwell-Evans, a man jocularly described by Lloyd George as “my Nazi” and a leading member of the Fellowship.

A specialized book that will be enjoyed more by readers with a good prior understanding of the political and diplomatic tensions between Germany and Great Britain prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. Its focus is on a small slice of the complicated history leading to war. Conwell-Evans provided assessments of the Nazi government to all four British PMs who held office in Hitler’s dozen years of power. He had penetrated the upper ranks of National Socialism, right up to the Führer himself, more deeply than any other Britain. Though closest to Ribbentrop, the foreign minister, he was also well connected with Hitler’s two deputies, Göring and Hess. At the same time he was ingratiating himself with the senior Nazis, Conwell-Evans was befriending the cabal of civil servants within the German foreign ministry, whose sustained effort to remove Hitler from office came closest to success. This engaging book offers a warning from history that remains terrifyingly relevant today." The Observer(UK) The founders of the AGF had mixed motives. The driving force behind it, a Welshman called Thomas Conwell-Evans, was a lover of German culture. Another leading figure, Ernest Tennant, while not actually an overt Nazi sympathiser in the mould of Oswald Mosley, was matey with the Ribbentrops and, as a businessman, saw no reason to become unduly concerned about the nastiness the Nazi regime was engaged in when friendship might improve trade and “understanding” between the two peoples.

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In this very well-researched and well-written work of historical revisionism, Charles Spicer reminds us of the important fact that not every Briton who wanted better relations with Nazi Germany did so from malign motives. Some were Germanophile, myopic, naïve, and amateur, but essentially well meaning. Understandably, they were incapable of believing—until it was almost too late—that Adolf Hitler was as evil as we, with our total historical hindsight, know him to have been.” A lively study of the “amateur British intelligence agents who…hoped to avert a second war in Europe by building rapport with the Third Reich politically, economically and socially.” How the British might have handled Hitler differently remains one of history's greatest ';what ifs'... If ever there was a case of the road to hell being paved with good intentions, it is surely the story that Charles Spicer tells so brilliantly and empathetically in this exceptionally well-written book. The Anglo-German Fellowship was established in Britain in the early 1930s by a group of well-connected and influential men, in the belief that Nazi Germany should not be appeased, but that it could be civilized. With the outbreak of war, the Fellowship became increasingly irrelevant, and was eventually disbanded. Posterity has not been kind to the Fellowship, at best ignoring it, at worst deriding its members as Nazi collaborators. This book seeks to rescue the Fellowship from such oblivion and opprobrium, and it does so challengingly and convincingly. David Cannadine Coffee with Hitler' tells the astounding and poignant story, for the first time, of a handful of amateur British intelligence agents who wined, dined and befriended the leading National Socialists between the wars. With support from royalty, aristocracy, politicians and businessmen, they hoped to use the much mythologised Anglo-German Fellowship as a vehicle to civilise the Nazis. A pacifist Welsh historian, a Great War flying ace, and a butterfly-collecting businessman offered the British government better intelligence on the horrifying rise of the Nazis than anyone else.