Coffee with Hitler

This book “Coffee With Hitler” by Charles Spicer is an interesting narrative 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.”

Throughout the 1930s, a clique of British aristocrats, scholars, and businessmen maintained friendly social contacts with prominent Nazis, including Hitler. Dismissed for decades as Nazi sympathizers, they have finally found a defender. Known mostly to history buffs, the author’s Germanophiles included Thomas Conwell-Evans, a Welsh political secretary and historian; Philip Kerr, a liberal politician, writer, and aristocrat; and Ernest Tennant, a wealthy businessman.

Few in their circle sympathized with British Nazism; most denounced antisemitic outrages; all were horrified by the carnage of World War I and felt guilty about the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles. In their eyes, however, Hitler was a fervent nationalist whose goal of returning his suffering nation to prosperity and global status deserved a measure of sympathy.

Nowadays, scholars display a more nuanced view of Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement, but popular histories continue to deplore the word, and politicians employ it to justify wars from Suez to Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan. Spicer emphasizes that his subjects did not aim to appease the Nazis but to civilize them. This was no secret. Many senior British officials dismissed these amateur agents, but the foreign service, starved for intelligence on Germany, took them seriously and often encouraged them.

The author engagingly recounts a steady stream of social events, banquets, conferences, cultural exchanges, and semi-official visits among well-known British political figures and top-level Nazis.

Although not fellow travelers, Spicer’s subjects bent over backward to see reason in Nazi policies and take advantage of Germany’s long-standing admiration of British culture, but they ultimately grew exasperated, concluded that Hitler was irrational, and supported war when it broke out.