BOOK: John Keay, "The Honourable Company"

John Keay: The Honourable Company: A History of the English East India Company. London: HarperCollinsPublishers, 1991. 0006380727. xx + 475 pp.

My experience with this book was much like that with Keay's India: A History, which I read a couple of years ago (see my post from back then): I didn't enjoy reading it as much as I had hoped I would, not due to any fault of the author's, but simply because it turned out that I wasn't quite as interested in the subject matter as I thought I would be.

As so often happens with histories — and so rarely with fiction — there are too many persons for me to be willing to take the trouble to keep track of them all in my mind, so I often had only the vaguest idea of who this captain or that factor was and how exactly he fits into the story. What also confused me a little is that the story isn't told in a strictly chronological order, but sometimes jumps backwards a little to cover the same period but in a different geographical area; but I'm not saying that that's a bad idea — it's probably the best way to organize a book about a subject like this.

In fact the author, as far as I can tell, did an excellent job. His style is engaging and vigorous, he keeps the story moving along at all times, he has an eye for the illuminating anecdote, and he is generous with short but vivid quotations from primary sources, complete with their original wonky early modern spelling and everything. If I found the book a bit boring to read, it isn't his fault at all.

And he has clearly read widely, not only in the primary sources, but also in the work of the 19th- and 20th-century historians, with whom he often engages in minor polemics. It seems that many of these earlier authors, writing as they did in the heyday of the British Empire, of which India was of course the crown jewel, regarded the history of the East India Company as little more than an unimportant prelude to what really mattered, i.e. the British Empire in India as it emerged in the 19th century. They were interested in the Company only insofar as its activities led to the emergence of this Empire. With Keay it is precisely the opposite. You can see that he is writing a book about the East India Company and by golly, he is going to stick to that; he has very little interest in what the Company did or didn't make possible for the Empire, and he brings the story to a surprisingly sudden close as soon as the Company sinks into irrelevance in the early 19th century.

Not that there's anything wrong with that — actually I liked his approach, as the British Empire in India is probably covered a lot more often in a lot more other books, so by focusing on the Company itself he could cover some less familiar ground and increase the chances of bringing new information to the reader. I myself certainly knew almost nothing about the Company before reading this book, so from that point of view it made for a very informative read.

*

It was not the first trading company in England, but it had some important innovations relative to earlier ones, such as the Levant Company (whose goal, by the way, had also been to import Far Eastern goods into England, except that it tried to do this overland across the Middle East rather than by sea; p. 13): those merely provided a regulatory framework within which its members “formed individual syndicates to raise capital and trade on their own account” (p. 27). By contrast, the East India Company itself raised capital from its members and then used it to operate trading voyages. But there was still one important difference compared to modern joint-stock corporations: the capital was raised for each voyage separately, and profits were likewise calculated and dividends paid out for each voyage separately. This had various downsides; e.g. after an unsuccessful voyage, it was hard to raise capital for the next one; and since voyages lasted several years and a new one was sent off before the last one had returned, they sometimes had agents representing several different voyages operating in some Eastern city at the same time and treating each other as rivals. The idea of having a stock of capital covering several voyages only came a few decades later (p. 99), and a permanent stock later still (p. 128).

As someone vaguely used to thinking of the East India Company as the entity whereby the British conquered the huge territory of India, I couldn't help being somewhat surprised by how modest its beginnings were. Its initial interests, in the early 17th century, were not so much in India but in the “Spice Islands”, the Banda archipelago in present-day Indonesia; and far from conquering (sub)continents, the best they could manage was to get some local sultan to grant them a plot of land for a “factory” (i.e. a trading agency and warehouse). They were mostly driven out of this early phase of the spice trade by the Dutch (pp. 50–1; the infamous Amboina massacre belongs to this period), and entered a period of decline (pp. 117–18). The Dutch had a much stronger naval presence in the Far East through their own East India Company, which was “a state venture” (p. 120), unlike the English one, which was mostly just an association of private merchants.

Another recurring problem that the English were facing was the balance of trade; they were importing spices and the like, but had to pay them with gold and silver since they couldn't export their own products there — unsurprisingly there wasn't much demand for woolen cloth in the sweltering jungles of India and southeast Asia (p. 74). Admittedly, this wasn't as much of a problem as some people feared at the time, since the English could recover some gold by re-exporting spices to other European countries at a profit (pp. 119–20). Their exports to the East really only began to grow in the early 19th century, by which time England was able to offer industrially produced (and therefore cheap) cotton cloth (p. 451).

In the early days, the Company occasionally paid dividends in kind, i.e. in pepper instead of money. Investors with the right connections could then try to increase their profit by exporting this pepper to the Continent instead of selling it in England (p. 64).

*

I was interested to learn that the three great cities from which British influence eventually spread into India — Madras, Calcutta, Bombay* — which are of course even greater cities now — aren't actually ancient Indian cities as I imagined; their history pretty much begins with the Company. Around 1640 they built a fort near a village called Madraspatnam, and the city of Madras grew out of that (pp. 68–9). Similarly, in 1687 they built a factory and base near a village called Kalighat, and Calcutta grew out of this (p. 156). Bombay seems to have been started by the Portuguese and was a settlement of no particular importance when its territory came under English rule as part of a dowry when Charles II married a Portuguese princess; the Company leased it from him in 1668 (p. 130).

[*This is also why, even in the 19th century, you still found British India divided into three “presidencies”: Bengal, Bombay, Madras. In the old Company days, a “president” was the chief factor (agent) in a given region; pp. 48, 99.]

*

One of the most important features of the Company was its monopoly on the import of goods into England from areas east of Africa. But this did not prevent various rivals (or “interlopers” as they seem to have been called) from trying to get a piece of the action. Whenever the Company's royal charter came up for renewal, there were debates on whether it would not be better for the country if the monopoly were abolished (pp. 170, 174–8). One William Courteen managed to get a charter for a rival company trading to Portuguese ports in the East in 1636 (p. 122), but it soon came to nothing. Later interlopers tried to get around the monopoly by acquiring charters from increasingly implausible European countries such as Austria, Poland, and Sweden (pp. 237–9).

It was easier to rival the Company in “country trade”, i.e. trade that started and ended in the East without reaching Europe at any point, as this doesn't seem to have been covered by its monopoly. The Company also allowed its employees to be involved in this (“private trade”) as a way to supplement their otherwise miserably low salaries (p. 172).

Eventually critics of the Company's monopoly and its corrupt business practices got the Parliament to approve a “New Company” (p. 182; in 1698), but the Old Company avoided getting shut down thanks to successful counter-lobbying, so that for a time both companies existed (p. 190); they merged in 1708 (p. 212).

*

Initially the Company was content to be just a trading company, but towards the end of the 17th century it began taking an interest in acquiring bits of territory and building fortifications, as India was increasingly unstable due to the Moghul Empire disintegrating (pp. 141–2, 243). They even had a short war against Aurangzeb, the last really powerful ruler of that empire, but they were easily defeated (p. 146). From one of his successors, Farrukhsiyar, the Company managed to obtain a farman or decree conferring various important trading rights and privileges upon it (in 1716; pp. 229, 232), an important step towards the expansion of their influence. (Keay comments that “the Company's timing had been impeccable”, as earlier emperors were too strong and would not have issued such a farman while the subsequent ones were too weak to do so; p. 231.)

For example, the farman exempted the Company from internal customs duties, but the Company interpreted this so broadly that it even began selling “passes” conferring this exemption upon any other merchant who cared to buy a pass (p. 235). Once the Company got strong enough to enforce this interpretation, they were able to deprive the nearby Nawab (governor) of Bengal of much of his revenue.

*

As the various European countries were often at war with one another, this also spilled into their emerging colonies in other parts of the word. Here in this book we repeatedly find the English fighting against nearby French or Dutch outposts, and usually succeeding in capturing some of their territory, but they were then often obliged to return it at the end of the war under the terms of the peace treaty concluded between their governments back in Europe.

From the middle of the 18th century, these wars also sped up the transformation of the Company from a mostly private trading organization focused on commerce to a mostly government-like organization focused on holding territory and gathering revenue (pp. 272–3). For example, there was a lot of fighting against the French near Madras as a result of the War of the Austrian Succession. As there was by then no firm Indian state in control of the area, both the British and the French often allied with opposite sides in various local power-struggles and were rewarded with “territories and revenues [. . .] not by right of conquest and at the expense of their enemies but by right of cession and at the expense of their allies” (p. 287–9). By then European armies were definitely better than Indian ones in various technical and organizational ways, having made much progress in the past one or two centuries (p. 291).

Nowadays, with history as a discipline being largely dominated by the woke movement, the prevailing view of British presence in India seems to be that promoted by the Indians themselves, according to which India had been a land of peace and plenty until the evil Britons showed up in Bengal, did nothing but plunder it for the next two or three centuries, and turned it into a land of poverty and famine. So I was quite interested to see a different view here in Keay's book. The way he presents things, government, either that of the Moghuls or of the various local rulers that followed in the wake of the decline of the Moghul empire, was already focused more or less entirely on tax collection, with nobody at any point in the ruling hierarchy having any notion that the purpose of the government might be to do anything for the people paying all those taxes. “Government was simply a euphemism for oppression under the imperial sanction of Moghul authority” (p. 292); “Moghul government amounted to little more than revenue management” (p. 377). In view of this, it isn't exactly obvious that the Company was oppressing or plundering its territories any worse than their previous Indian rulers had done.

*

In Bengal, the Company's abuse of the customs exemptions got it into conflicts with the Nawab of Bengal, who even captured Calcutta at one point (1756; the Black Hole of Calcutta belongs to this episode, p. 304). Later there was also fighting with the French as a result of the Seven Years' War (pp. 311–14, 339–44); the French were largely pushed out of India. The British supported a palace coup against the Nawab of Bengal and, after defeating his forces in the Battle of Plassey, the new Nawab (and the subsequent ones) was little more than their puppet (pp. 316–19, 370–2) and much of his revenues went towards paying the various sums he had promised to the British in exchange for their support. Robert Clive and other prominent British officials became fabulously wealthy in the process (p. 320–1).

As a result of all this, the Company was now practically in control of Bengal and acted more like a government than a business there (p. 331), but they were still doing a lot of trading elsewhere, notably in China, as the English were becoming a tea-drinking nation (p. 349). But the Company as a business wasn't terribly prosperous despite all this; revenues from Bengal weren't as high as had been hoped, maintaining its armies and administrators there was expensive, it was hard to export anything to China to balance out the imports of tea from there, and meanwhile the shareholders were pressing the Company to pay out increasingly high dividends (pp. 367, 378).

Traditionally the Company had been under the control of its directors who were mostly interested in trade, but now its “nabobs” (high-ranking employees who got rich in the process of territorial expansion) had the upper hand (p. 380). The general public in Britain got the impression that the Company's administration of its Indian territories was corrupt and oppressive (p. 382), and it was not far from there to the idea that the British government would do a better job of it. The government gained an increasing influence over the Company, partly by lending it money, partly by suitable provisions being inserted in various acts of parliament (pp. 384–5).

Even at this late stage, the Company was still involved in all sorts of interesting activities. We find it sending missions and expeditions to Tibet (pp. 423–4), Vietnam (pp. 425–8), Penang (p. 429), and New Guinea (p. 441). In an effort to finally find something to export to China, it even sponsored an expedition to Alaska, as there was apparently a great demand for otter furs in China. This led to the interesting question of whether Alaska counts as east or west of England for the purposes of the Company's monopoly; but then the question became moot as the Government founded a new “King George Sound Company” (pp. 432–4).

*

By 1785, the Company could be described as “a quasi-state department” (p. 391), at least in its role in administration of territories in India. As a trading company it continued for a few more decades; its monopoly was watered down in 1793 (p. 439) and abolished for the India trade in 1813 (p. 393) and for the China trade in 1833 (p. 456). But even this last step, in a sense, was just a formality; for example, it had been possible to bypass its China monopoly by trading in two steps, first between London and Singapore (which counted as India trade and was thus free of monopoly) and then between Singapore and Canton (which counted as “country trade” and thus also free of monopoly); p. 454. Part of the pressure for abolishing the monopoly came from British textile manufacturers, who by then could mass-produce cheap cotton goods and felt that the Company had effectively been using its monopoly to protect Indian weavers from this competition (pp. 451–2).

The Company was “finally wound up” in 1873 (p. 393), but what exactly it was doing between the loss of its monopolies and this final winding up, Keay does not tell us; perhaps it was doing nothing at all.

*

Apropos of nothing in particular: Captain William Heath, who visited Canton in the late 17th century, writes: “The abominable sin of sodomy is tolerated here, and all over China, and so is buggery, which they use both with beasts and fowls, in so much that Europeans do not care to eat duck except what they bring up themselves, either from the egg or from small ducklings.” (P. 206.) Talk about secret sauce :))))

BOOK: Howard Smith, "Last Train from Berlin"

Howard K. Smith: Last Train from Berlin. London: The Cresset Press, 1942. vii + 266 pp.

Smith was an American journalist who reported from Germany during the first two years of the WW2, while the United States was (in principle) still neutral. He published this book in 1942, after his return to the USA. I found it an interesting read, but I have much the same complaint as with Arvid Fredborg's Behind the Steel Wall, which I read a few years ago: I wish there was more about what it was like to work as a journalist in wartime Germany, and less about how the war was going, what the internal dynamics of the Third Reich were, and the like — I can read these latter things in the work of any number of later historians who are in a much better position to see the whole picture than someone living in the middle of those events had been. The problem, of course, is that the readers in 1942 very reasonably had exactly the opposite preferences than me in these matters, and authors like Smith and Fredborg wrote for them, not for the likes of me. Still, I enjoyed the book a lot; Smith not only observed things, but also thought about them a good deal, and I found something interesting on practically every other page.

*

Smith first visited Germany in 1936; he had just graduated from college and wanted to travel in Europe a bit before settling down, and he went to Germany because it was cheapest (p. 1). But he also wanted to find out how the Nazi system worked in Germany; he was surprised by how heavily militarized everything in Germany had already become by then (pp. 6–7), and it was clear that an enourmous amount of resources were being dedicated to rearmament (while the standards of living of the civilian population had actually declined since the Nazi takeover of power; p. 12). From this, Smith concluded that the regime was inevitably on a course for war.

In 1937–39, he spent two years at Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship (pp. 22–8); he was impressed by how keenly the students were involved in political clubs, and he himself seems to have spent more time on activism for the Labour Club than on studying. When war started, he was pleasantly surprised to see that Britain was actually going to stand up to Hitler this time (p. 28), but was disappointed by how uninspired British propaganda was (pp. 31–2). He got himself a job with the United Press and went to Berlin in January 1940 (pp. 28, 30).

There are a couple of odd insults at Hitler's expense that I haven't seen before. I know that his very modest artistic career led some people so mockingly refer to him as a housepainter and the like, but Smith upgrades this to “a second-rate, psychopathic carpenter with a third-rate intellect” (p. 16) and “a wall-paper hanger” (p. 29)!

Interesting factoid of the day: Hitler's half-brother Alois (from their father's second marriage — Adolf was from the third) was running a “little restaurant” in Berlin (pp. 46, 105).

*

Since the war was going well for Germany for the first couple of years, the Nazi regime was bursting with self-confidence and didn't supervise the foreign reporters as closely as later (p. 34). After the first air-raids against Berlin, they were allowed to report freely as the Germans wanted to show how insignificant the damage had been; but as the raids grew more serious, the reporters' access was correspondingly reduced (pp. 43–4).

American reporters were treated particularly well in the first year or so of the war, as Germany still hoped that America would stay neutral; but Smith says that despite these efforts they were not in the least bit favourable to the Nazis (pp. 35–6). But as the U.S. supported Britain more and more, the Nazis became increasingly anti-American; Roosevelt took the place of Churchill as the big bogeyman of their propaganda (p. 153), and American reporters in Germany were increasingly harassed by the Nazi authorities. Some of them (notably Richard Hottelet) were imprisoned for months at a time, without any definite charges being brought against them (pp. 166–7); the offices of the United Press, where Smith worked, were raided by the Gestapo for no real reason other than to intimidate them (pp. 160–6). Despite this pressure, many of them persisted in Berlin, considering that sort of risks to simply be a part of journalism (pp. 169, 172).

To me one of the most interesting things about journalists' memoirs is to see some glimpses of how they work. Smith says he was surprised by the Nazi invasion of Norway, but in hindsight he saw there had been many signs pointing to it (e.g. masses of mountain troops passing through Berlin on the way north), and he resolved to pay more attention next time (pp. 39–40). For example, he tracked the regime's attitude towards Soviet Union by watching anti-Soviet books disappear from the German bookstores in 1939 and then re-emerge in 1941 (pp. 46–7), a hint that the Nazis were planning to make a move against the Soviet Union. Various other signs and rumours soon followed (pp. 48–9).

He had been surprised, and dismayed, by the German military successes of 1940, and in early 1941 he had almost quit his job and left Germany, but then decided to stay when he saw that an attack on Soviet Union seemed to be brewing (pp. 45–6).

There's an interesting chapter about the momentous occasion on October 9, 1941, when Hitler's press chief, Dr. Otto Dietrich, stepped before the gathered reporters and announced that the Soviet Union was as good as defeated (pp. 60, 62–3). He was supposed to announce the successful progress of a new German offensive started a week or so before, but he seems to have got a little carried away, perhaps because he knew that some major good news were sorely needed by the German public, which was getting weary of the war in view of the fact that the Soviet Union wasn't showing any signs of imminent collapse, contrary to many confident predictions made at the start of the German invasion of Russia (p. 71). The American reporters figured that Dietrich's statement was probably true, since a lie of that magnitude would come to light soon enough and cause him enormous embarrassment (p. 63). The German public, too, was tremendously elated (although Goebbels prudently prevented the German press from quoting Dietrich's statements directly, p. 65, and had the triumphalism toned down over the next few days, p. 77), and began dreaming of the prosperity and opportunities that would soon open up in the forthcoming German colonial empire in the East (p. 76). Soon, of course, reality began to set in and the regime's media lost all credibility with the German public (pp. 78–80).

By the way, you've got to love mid-20th-century slang: by attacking the Soviet Union, “[s]heerly on the bases of geography and numbers Hitler had pulled a boner.” (P. 52.)

*

One interesting change that Smith describes as occurring in 1941, after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, was the massive and surprisingly fast decline in the amount and quality of food and consumer goods available to the German population (p. 96). During the times of easy victories in the first couple of years of the war, Germany was able to cover its deficiencies by looting the resources of the occupied countries (p. 85), but these were being looted too quickly (for a time there had actually been a kind of unnatural prosperity in Germany; p. 86), and had been largely exhausted by the time the German invasion of the Soviet Union began.

Smith describes the various ways in which the Nazis tried to cope with the resulting shortages: for example, first they reduced the meat rations; then, fearing the bad effects on morale of further reductions, they simply supplied less meat to shops and restaurants without officially decreasing the rations (p. 89), resulting in massive queueing as people tried to buy meat before the shops ran out. Various other foodstuffs were replaced by ersatz versions concocted with foul-smelling chemicals of dubious nutritional value (p. 93). The territorial gains made in Russia in the first few months after the invasion didn't really help either, as the Soviets had evacuated all industry to the east before retreating (p. 104).

All this led to an overall air of seediness and a decline in industrial production (pp. 100, 103). “I never thought it was possible for a country to go so universally trashy so quickly.” (P. 116.) The people's health declined, they turned pale, weary and irritable, and resorted widely to drugs and patent medicines in an effort to regain some energy (pp. 119–21). The seediness even extended to government: “the whole Nazi civil government is in a state of unbelievable chaos” (p. 125) because Hitler and the other bigwigs largely lost interest in anything but military affairs.

Smith makes an interesting observation that by late 1941, most Germans weren't supporting the Nazi regime out of any real enthusiasm for it any more, but because they were afraid what would happen to them if Germany lost the war (a fear which Nazi propaganda, of course, was very keen to stoke; p. 123). The only section of the population that still believed zealously in the Nazi system were the children, who had been exposed to its propaganda full-time all their lives (pp. 127–8) and to whom the regime had always taken special care to appeal (p. 225).

There's an interesting chapter on the development of the Nazi anti-Jewish policy. Smith begins with the observation that “when people become discontented, they can get angry at one of two things: at conditions, or at people. The one reaction is generally that of maturity; the other, of immaturity.” (P. 130.) This latter reaction is often deliberately encouraged by the ruling elites to give the people an easy scapegoat for their problems, and Smith points out that this was the basis both of anti-Semitism in Germany as well as of the anti-black activities of the KKK in America (p. 130). Anti-Jewish propaganda and persecution actually slackened a little in the first couple of years of the war, when the German people were pretty content due to the string of easy victories, but it was ramped up again once the campaign against the Soviet Union started to go badly (p. 132). By late 1941 the Jews still remaining in Berlin were being ‘resettled’ to the East (pp. 138–40). Smith's understanding was that they were mostly being taken to occupied Soviet territories to be worked to death building roads and the like (p. 140). Of course we now know that a lot of Jews were killed outright without being put to work, but most of that would have started in 1942 (e.g. the Wannsee Conference was in January 1942), after Smith's departure from Germany.

When the requirement for Jews to wear the star of David on their clothes was introduced in September 1941, it proved unpopular with the German public; and the authorities apparently tried to justify it with the bizarre fake claim that the U.S. authorities had similarly forced German-Americans to wear a swastika on their clothes :S (pp. 146–7). What is also interesting is that apparently the Nazi authorities didn't make this latter claim openly and officially, but had their low-level officials put it into circulation amongst the public as a rumour (p. 147).

It is deplorably popular nowadays amongst libertarians and other such vermin to claim that nazism was a form of socialism — iT's RiGhT tHeRe In ThE nAmE, bRo! — and I was glad to see that Smith doesn't go in for that sort of nonsense in the least. “Too many observers have allowed themselves to be fooled by the fact that, for reasons of expediency, Hitler chose to call his party the National Socialist German Workers Party” (p. 181), but his mass support during the years of his rise to power really came from the small bourgeoisie, the lower middle class, much more than from the proletariat; and if you look at the practical results of Nazi policies, the only class that really benefited from them was the topmost layer of capitalists. “The state is allegedly national ‘Socialist’, but for a socialist state it maintains the finest, fattest crop of unadulterated plutocrats you ever dreamed of.” (P. 125.) “In actual fact, Nazism is the most reactionary and vicious form of capitalism hat has ever existed” (p. 179). The economy was controlled by a system of boards that consisted mostly of the biggest capitalists in their respective branches of the economy, and their profits flourished enormously; meanwhile the workers found their wages and their standards of life decline steadily from year to year; and the petite bourgeoisie — the small business owners, shopkeepers and the like — found themselves squeezed out of the market by big business even harder than before Hitler's rise to power (pp. 182–4, 188). Nazism “is not socialism, but a form of capitalism that is virtually feudalistic in safeguards granted to and preserved for the wealthy, as well as in the total servitude it demands of those who possess nothing but their hands and brains to work with.” (P. 184.) The SA, being the mass organization through which a certain kind of revolutionary aspirations of the lower middle class could perhaps express themselves, was gradually sidelined by Hitler and, in August 1941, as good as shut down for all practical purposes (pp. 190–2). The disappointment of the lower middle class can be summarized in the bitter joke: “What is the difference between Germany and Russia? In Russia the weather is colder.” (P. 195.)

Smith's departure from Germany was not without a touch of excitement. Relations between the U.S. and Germany had been deteriorating for some time and by late 1941 it was almost impossible for journalists like him to work. The German authorities stepped up their pressure and, no longer content merely with censoring them, increasingly tried to pressure them into including actual German propaganda talking-points in their reports and broadcasts (p. 259). At that point Smith decided to quit and return to America, but the Nazi authorities refused to let him leave unless his employer, the CBS, sent a replacement, evidently to function as a hostage to prevent Smith from badmouthing the Nazis after returning to America! (P. 260.) Fortunately the Germans allowed Smith to leave once the CBS promised to send someone, without waiting for that someone to actually arrive. Smith crossed the border into Switzerland in the morning of December 7, 1941 (see pp. 264–5 for a wonderful description of the contrast between the bleak, dreary Berlin and the peaceful and prosperous Switzerland; it was like stepping from a black-and-white movie to a colour one). In the evening of the same day, Pearl Harbor was attacked; had Smith waited but half a day longer, it would have been impossible for him to leave Germany.

*

Smith concludes the book with a couple of chapters discussing how nazism might be defeated. There was some internal opposition, coming from the communists (with whom a lot of German workers still sympathized; p. 203), the catholic church (p. 205), and the traditional Prussian officer class (p. 209); but in Smith's view it was unlikely that any of these would topple the regime from within. Besides, Hitler had protected himself well by building up institutions such as the Gestapo and (as a sort of counterweight to the army) the Waffen-SS, both of which were absolutely loyal to him (pp. 213, 226). Apparently Himmler even suggested setting up an SS air force and navy, but Hitler did not adopt this plan (p. 218).

As for defeating Nazi Germany from outside, Smith says that the situation actually looked fairly promising. As of his writing, probably in early 1942, Germany was clearly getting badly exhausted in her unsuccessful attempts to defeat the Soviet Union, and was meanwhile also facing a lot of resistance in other occupied territories (pp. 230–1). Smith expresses admiration for the tenacity of the Soviet defense (p. 240), and says the democratic Allies should emulate the Soviets' commitment to total war: “there is still too much slack in our war effort” (p. 239). He even finds a good word for the pre-war purges in the Soviet army: “Had Russia not ‘liquidated’ a few thousand officers and bureaucrats, there is little doubt that the Red Army would have collapsed in two months, and left us holding a bag, many times bigger, containing Hitler and all Europe, and most of Asia. Had we liquidated a few, the war might never have happened.” (P. 240).

But his boldest suggestion is to carry out sweeping social and economical reforms in the Allied countries as a way of giving the German public a vision of what a better post-war order might look like (p. 247). Countries like the U.S., Smith says, had mostly achieved “political democracy [. . .] in which each individual possesses one unit of political power”, but they were far from the state of “economic democracy [. . .] in which each individual has approximately one unit of economic power” (p. 250). This inequality in turn leads to political inequality because the rich people can influence the political process far out of proportion to their numbers. He ends with some concrete proposals: nationalize the mines and the arms industry, and give independence to the colonies, immediately where possible, or in at most five years (p. 253).

I was really pleasantly surprised to see such openly leftist ideas, as I wouldn't have expected anyone but dreary boring Marxist doctrinaires advocating such things back then, and it's clear enough that Smith is not one of those — it's obvious from the style of the book if nothing else, for it is the style of your typical hard-boiled, red-blooded 1940s American journalist. Anyway, as we now know, some of his ideas would in fact get implemented, though in a massively watered-down form; there was some nationalization of industries in the first few decades after the war (probably more so in Europe than in the U.S., though), and the colonies did eventually get their independence, though not as quickly or as smoothly as he had suggested. Alas, the forces of capital then rallied again and we now live in a more unequal society than at any point in the last hundred years.

ToRead:

• Stephen Roberts: The House that Hitler Built (1937). [Also an updated edition in 1938.] Mentioned here on p. 123: “as nearly perfect a picture of that strange complicated mechanism [i.e. the Nazi system] as it was in peace time, as it is possible for a human to draw.”
• Jan Valtin: Out of the Night (1940). An autobiographical work of somewhat doubtful authenticity, mentioned here on p. 228.

BOOK: Volker Ullrich, "Hitler: Downfall"

Volker Ullrich: Hitler: A Biography. Volume 2: Downfall 1939–45. Translated by Jefferson Chase. London: The Bodley Head, 2020. 9781847922885. x + 838 pp.

I read volume 1 of Ullrich's biography of Hitler a few years ago (see my post from back then), and liked it quite a bit, so when I now saw volume 2 in a bookstore (my first visit to a bookstore after keeping away for more than a year due to the coronavirus epidemic :)) I bought it at once and started reading it. The first thing I noticed is that although both of my volumes are paperback editions, vol. 2 is in a slightly larger format than volume 1, and the type is perhaps also a tiny bit larger. Annoying — I wish the publishers were more consistent about these things. But looking at the ISBNs, it seems that what I got is a bizarre chimera of an edition: if I search for the ISBN from my copy of the book on amazon, it finds the *hardcover* edition, while the paperback edition shown on amazon has a different ISBN (9780099590248). So I guess that my copy uses the format of the hardcover edition but is bound as a paperback, with a different RRP (£20 for my copy, £30 for the hardcover as shown on amazon and £18.99 for the paperback as shown on amazon) and a different imprint (my copy has Bodley Head as the imprint, same as the hardcover on amazon, while the paperback on amazon has Virago as the imprint — same, incidentally, as my copy of volume 1).

Vol. 2 picks up where vol. 1 left off, just before the outbreak of WW2. As the author says in the introduction (p. 2), Hitler was very closely involved in controlling German military operations during the WW2, so a biography of this part of his life is inevitably also something of a history of the war, at least of its European and Middle-Eastern aspects (as opposed to the East Asian and Pacific ones). I was a bit worried about this since I'm not really interested in military history, but now having read the book, it wasn't too bad at all. Although we do hear a good deal about military operations, the narrative nevertheless keeps coming back to Hitler and his various other activities, so I never really had the time to get bored with the military stuff. Besides, there are a lot of things to cover in a book like this, so it can never stay on one subject for too long, and there's no risk of it getting boring.

Much as with vol. 1, one thing I really liked about Ullrich's approach is that he also describes Hitler as a person and not only as a political actor. Here in volume 2, this means that we witness his constant physical and psychological decline. Partly that was probably due to the stress of knowing that the war was lost, which he must surely have realized somewhere around 1942 at the latest (p. 626), though we see him constantly faking optimism when talking to other people well into 1945 (and often enough managing to convince them that not all is lost yet; pp. 381, 398, 531, 768 n. 65); but partly his decline must have been due to overwork and an irregular lifestyle (p. 534). He took on a lot of work in running the military campaigns that a normal political leader would have left to the generals; therefore he routinely stayed up all night and then slept until noon (pp. 192–3, 227, 439, 547).

As the war went on, he increasingly gave up all semblance of social life, all forms of exercise and entertainment (e.g. previously he had enjoyed watching movies, but then gave it up supposedly because it would be unseemly to have this sort of fun while the war is going on), and mostly just stayed cooped up inside his various bunkers and field headquarters (p. 528). He lost his zest for public appearances and speeches, and even his ever-loyal propaganda minister Goebbels had the hardest time persuading him to make the occasional radio address (pp. 516, 526, 543).

In March 1943, Göring remarked that Hitler had aged 15 years in the span of 3.5 years. (P. 345. I couldn't help being reminded of how you often hear similar things about American presidents, with photos to prove it; a president's term lasts four years but when you compare the photos before and after it, you see he has aged by more like eight. And that's even without fighting on the losing side of a total war.) By the last year or so of the war, we see Hitler shuffling around as a frail husk of a person, prematurely geriatric at the age of 55, his hand trembling violently, his eyesight failing so that they had to use special typewriters with extra large letters to write documents for him to read, etc. (pp. 443, 474, 546). We see his physician, Theodor Morell, constantly having to administer pills and “pick-me-up injections” (pp. 512, 533) just to get him on his feet and keep him working. [“Dr Köster's Anti-Gas Pills contained strychnine”, p. 498 :))]

A recurring theme in this book is his unwillingness to delegate, or to trust the people to whom he had delegated something; he kept expecting impossible things from his generals and then firing them when they invariably failed to do what he wanted (pp. 228, 317–19, 522, 540). [“Yes, we produce a great many field marshals, but we also use them up quite swiftly.” — Helmuth Greiner to his wife, 27 Sept. 1942 (p. 766, n. 13).] His tendency to take big risks paid off well in the first years of the war, with unexpectedly easy successes in 1939 and 1940, where his generals had wanted to be more cautious; this got Hitler used to the idea that he was a military genius (p. 113) while his generals were incompetents who lacked the ‘indomitable will’ and ideological commitment on which, in his view, such military successes depended (pp. 235, 428). As the war began to turn against Germany, he increasingly blamed his generals for all the failures, and his relations with them kept on deteriorating. I don't doubt that Germany would have lost the war in any case, but his meddling in military matters seemed to often just make things worse for them, e.g. when he insisted on never retreating (pp. 316, 331, 432, 625), even if that meant that large numbers of German soldiers would end up surrounded and captured by the enemy.

Speaking of delegation, it's almost funny when, late in the war, he pretty much ran out of generals to fire and replace, so he appointed Himmler, one of his most loyal henchmen, as the commander of one of the army groups. Unsurprisingly, leading the defense against the Red Army turned out to be a bit more difficult than herding helpless Jews into cattle cars and gas chambers, and Himmler proved an embarrassing failure in his new position (pp. 553, 555).

And speaking of the holocaust, there's an interesting chapter about it, in which I was particularly struck by how gradually the Nazi policies on that subject got worse. The idea of outright killing all Jews they could get their hands on came comparatively late (p. 248). Before the war their idea of getting rid of the Jews was to have them emigrate from Germany. This began to change in 1941, when they forbade any further Jewish emigration (p. 239); this surprised me, but unfortunately the book doesn't go into any details as to why they made that change. In any case, the war also brought a move towards more aggressive anti-Jewish policies; partly the Nazis believed, in accordance with their ideology, that the Jews were a dangerous internal enemy and must be removed before the war could be won, and partly they now had so many more Jews under their control due to the occupation first of Poland and then of Soviet territories (pp. 246, 252), that waiting for them to emigrate would be impracticable. They toyed with the infamous Madagascar plan for a while (pp. 250–1), but that had to be abandoned as Germany never achieved the sort of naval and air supremacy (especially over Britain) that would allow them to transport such masses of Jews there (p. 253). The next idea, deporting Jews somewhere into occupied Soviet territories (pp. 256, 267), was blocked by the German failure to defeat the Soviet Union. Killing the Jews outright was a natural next step, and the Nazis soon moved towards it, at the end of 1941 (p. 291).

[On a semi-related note: it is of course well known that the euthanasia programme against the mentally ill was a sort of prelude to the holocaust, involving many of the same people and some of the same techniques. What was new to me is that William Shirer, the American journalist who reported from Germany until late 1940, managed to actually carry out some investigative journalism on this subject and found that the disabled and mentally ill were being systematically killed; “[u]sing death notices taken out in local papers by the victims' relatives, Shirer was able to name three of the killing centers” (p. 246). He wrote about this in his Berlin Diary, published after his return to America.]

While reading about this, I couldn't help feeling how tragic it is that they were in such a damnable hurry about everything. To be sure, genocide is morally wrong no matter what method you use to do it, but it could nevertheless be done so much more humanely than with mass killings, if only they hadn't been in such a hurry. Emigration would have been sufficient, especially if coupled with a Chinese-style one-child policy for those who did not wish to emigrate; and to make emigration easier, the Nazis should of course have refrained from ruining the Jews economically. It wouldn't have required any violence or murder, and could all have been over in a few decades. For people who claimed they were building a thousand-year Reich, the Nazis were surprisingly impatient.

Hitler's role in the holocaust is an illustrative example of his style of leadership. He didn't need to issue any explicit orders or anything of that sort; it was enough for him to ‘make his wishes known’ to his henchmen (pp. 276, 278, 290–1), and they would then practically vie with each other to implement them. In fact this would strike me as a very good approach to leadership if it were applied to some good cause: surround yourself with people who believe in the same goals as you do, and who will work towards those same goals without you having to give them orders for every little thing.

Of course, there are other things about Hitler's style of leadership that are less commendable. We see numerous examples of his manipulative, divide-and-conquer approach: he would give his minions overlapping spheres of responsibility, thereby making sure they would regard each other as rivals and expend their energies on the inevitable squabbles that ensued; this in turn made Hitler's position unassailable and indispensable, as he was the only source of authority that could resolve such disputes (p. 610).

Another recurring subject in this book is how crappy Hitler's allies and potential allies were, with the exception of Japan (but that was far away) and possibly Finland. At one point he had some talks with Franco about Spain maybe joining the Axis, but Franco demanded huge parts of French colonial territory as a reward while avoiding making any concrete promises of his own. Hitler apparently said later that “he would ‘rather get three or four teeth pulled than go through that again’ ” (p. 136) :))

Speaking of the personal side of Hitler's life, I couldn't help being impressed with what we see of Eva Braun here. She comes across as a rather sympathetic character, and you can't help wishing that she had fallen in love with some decent man rather than with Hitler. In the last year or so of the war, she seems to have been pretty much the only one to bring some cheerful mood into the eternally depressed atmosphere of Hitler's bunker (pp. 445, 573); and at the end, she didn't *have* to stay with him and commit suicide, but she chose to anyway (pp. 510, 545, 584): “I owe him everything nice in my life, and the only thing I can do for him is to stay by his side.” (P. 771, n. 46.)

The book ends with a very interesting chapter on ‘Hitler's place in history’. There is some not-very-productive discussion about whether he counts as a “great man” (p. 627) — which surely depends a lot more on what exactly we mean by “great” in this context than about any inherent characteristics of Hitler himself — but the author strikes what seemed to me as very commendable middle ground. On the one hand, Hitler would not have been able to become what he was, and accomplish what he did, if the political, social, economic etc. conditions in Weimar Germany had not been what they were (pp. 613–14). (For instance, if the old elites concentrated around Hindenburg hadn't been so insanely hostile to democracy and the labour movement, they might not have had Hindenburg appoint Hitler as chancellor, but someone else.) This speaks against the ‘great man’ theory. But on the other hand, Hitler would also not have been able to accomplish what he did without a number of individual, personal characteristics and abilities (pp. 608–9). There were plenty of nationalist agitators in early Weimar Germany, but none who could move the masses with his oratory the way Hitler did. He was also very good at adapting his message to the audience (e.g. saying different things to rich industrialists than to a beer hall full of lower-middle-class people), and he was a very capable organizer, as can be seen from the fact that the Nazi party almost fell apart while he was in prison. So, in the end, it took both personal characteristics and the right environment to make Hitler what he was.

Now that I've read the second volume of Ullrich's biography, I think I like it even better than after the first volume, and if someone asked me which biography of Hitler he should read, I think I would recommend Ullrich's rather than Kershaw's. But that might be just a biased opinion because it's been a long time since I've read Kershaw's book. They are both excellent, but I do think that Ullrich's is a little more well-rounded.

P.S. I noticed a small translation error: on p. 329 Laval is described as the “French chief of state”. This attracted my attention because surely the chief of state was Pétain; but it turns out that the German edition has it right: “Regierungschef” = head of government, i.e. the prime minister, which is exactly what Laval was.

P.P.S. A fine contribution to my collection of anti-lawyer quotes: “Today Hitler states clearly and unambiguously that everyone who was a lawyer was in his eyes either born defective or would become so.” :)) (A remark from 29 March 1942, quoted here on p. 718, n. 33.)

ToRead:

• Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler (1947). Mentioned here on p. 594.
• Richard Overy, 1939: Countdown to War (London, 2009). Mentioned here on p. 645 (n. 14) and elsewhere.
• Carl J. Burckhardt, Meine Danziger Mission 1937–1939 (Munich, 1980). Mentioned here on p. 646, n. 62. Burckhardt was the League of Nations High Commissioner in Danzig in the last few years before the outbreak of the WW2, at which point the Nazis annexed Danzig to Germany and kicked him out. He was from the same prominent Basel family as the famous Jacob Burckhardt, author of The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy.
• William L. Shirer, This is Berlin: Reporting from Nazi Germany, 1938–40 (London, 1999). Mentioned here on p. 654, n. 5 and elsewhere. A posthumous collection of his radio broadcasts.
• Howard K. Smith, Last Train from Berlin: An Eye-Witness Account of Germany at War (1942). Smith was an American journalist who reported from Germany in 1940 and 1941. Ullrich mentions the German edition of his book, Feind schreibt mit: Ein amerikanischer Korrespondent erlebt Nazi-Deutschland (Berlin, 1982), on p. 689, n. 221.
• Timothy W. Ryback, Hitler's Private Library: The Books that Shaped His Life (London, 2009). Mentioned here on p. 773, n. 81. Among other things he was very interested in Frederick the Great (in whose footsteps he imagined himself to have been following), and he particularly liked Thomas Carlyle's 19th-century biography of Frederick. This rather surprised me; wasn't there anything suitable by some German biographer?