Lloyd George not only opposed any British-French military action in the Rhineland, he called on his colleagues to try to see the world from Germany’s point of view...... Lloyd George implored Parliament to see Germany’s dilemma and forcefully argued Hitler’s case in the House of Commons:
France had built the most gigantic fortifications ever seen in any land, where, almost a hundred feet underground you can keep an army of over 100,000 and where you have guns that can fire straight into Germany. Yet, the Germans are supposed to remain without even a garrison, without even a trench…. If Herr Hitler had allowed that to go on without protecting his country, he would have been a traitor to the Fatherland.
After commending Hitler for having reoccupied the Rhineland to protect his country, Lloyd George received an invitation—to Berchtesgaden. Out of that meeting, the ex–prime minister emerged “spellbound by Hitler’s astonishing personality and manner.”
“He is indeed a great man” were Lloyd George’s first words, as he compared Mein Kampf to the Magna Carta and declared Hitler “The Resurrection and the Way” for Germany.
In an interview with the News-Chronicle on his return to England, Lloyd George assured his countrymen, “Germany has no desire to attack any country in Europe…Hitler is arming for defence and not for attack.”28 Asked what he thought of Germany having become a dictatorship, the old prime minister responded, “Hitler has done great things for his country. He is unquestionably a great leader…a dynamic personality.”
Nor was Lloyd George alone among British statesmen in being taken with Hitler. Eden had met with Hitler in 1934 and written his wife, “Dare I confess?…I rather liked him.”30 John Simon, Eden’s predecessor as foreign secretary, described Hitler to King George as “an Austrian Joan of Arc with a moustache.”
In 1937, three years after the Night of the Long Knives murders of Roehm and his SA henchmen, two years after the Nuremberg Laws had been imposed on the Jews, one year after Hitler had marched into the Rhineland, Churchill published Great Contemporaries. He included in it his 1935 essay “Hitler and His Choice.” In this profile, Churchill expresses his “admiration for the courage, the perseverance, and the vital force which enabled [Hitler] to challenge, defy, conciliate, or overcome, all the authorities or resistances which barred his path.”
“Those who have met Herr Hitler face to face,” wrote Churchill, “have found a highly competent, cool, well-informed functionary with an agreeable manner, a disarming smile, and few have been unaffected by a subtle personal magnetism.”33 Hitler and his Nazis had surely shown “their patriotic ardor and love of country.”
