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Coffeewith Hitlertellsthe astounding story of how a handful of amateur Britishintelligence agents wined, dined, and befriendedthe leading NationalSocialists between the wars. With support from royalty, aristocracy,politicians, and businessmen, they hoped to use the recently foundedAnglo-German Fellowship as a vehicle to civilize and enlighten the Nazis. His meticulously researched, vividly written book takes 'civilising rather than appeasing as its central theme.' This is a complex tale, but as skillfully narrated by Spicer, it moves along briskly. His main characters are not easy to characterize either, but he brings them to life, with all their contradictions." Oneworld has acquired Charles Spicer’s debut title, Coffee with Hitler: The British Amateurs Who Tried to Civilise the Nazis, publishing in September 2022.
In 1939, Chamberlain appointed Lord Lothian as Ambassador to the U.S. where the latter - now passionately pro-war - did much to build public understanding that Britain would stay the course. He helped persuade the reluctant United States into the conflict and served as a sharp contrast to America’s Ambassador Kennedy in London.
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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 for hindsight, it is all very well now to deride and insult Neville Chamberlain and his administration for soft-pedalling with Hitler (which they unquestionably did) and for leaving Britain weak (a policy of earlier administrations that they sought to reverse): but the judgments we make about British attitudes towards Germany in the 1930s ignore the fact that not all Germans were Nazis, and are made with our knowledge of Auschwitz, Belsen and Dachau, the subjugation of Poland and the occupation of France and the Low Countries. Before all that happened, things were rather different. Coffee with Hitler tells the story of how a handful of British amateur spies, under the guise of the Anglo-German Fellowship, wined, dined and befriended some of the most senior Nazis. The synopsis explains: "The British government’s aloofness had alienated the German leaders fuelling their appetite for conflict. Far from appeasing the regime, this group gathered alarming intelligence that showed Neville Chamberlain’s foreign policy as bound to lead to war. These were neither career diplomats nor professional intelligence agents but ranged from a pacifist Welsh historian and a Great War flying ace to an Old Etonian butterfly collector. The book draws on newly discovered sources that reveal Winston Churchill’s true feelings about the state of play on the eve of war." When Hitler rose to power in the early 1930s, public reaction in Britain was not that of unalloyed horror. Instead, it lay somewhere between disinterest, snobbish, if inaccurate, contempt (“the man’s a house painter!”), and, in some circles, quiet satisfaction that a vigorous reformer had shaken up his country in an apparently effective and forward-looking fashion. The evils of the Nazi regime were obvious to anyone with either a social conscience or a knowledge of history, but it was more convenient either to ignore them, or, in the case of a group of well-meaning but misguided society figures, to attempt to mitigate them by means of the so-called Anglo-German Fellowship. 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 is based on eight years of painstaking research among letters, intelligence reports, membership lists, and other primary sources, many of which have been lost or overlooked by historians for the past eighty years. 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.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." An essential account of a chaotic administration that, Woodward makes painfully clear, is incapable of governing. 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. Yes, it was a vehicle for appeasement, but that basic stance gave the foursome credibility in their work with and against the Nazis. Grahame Christie, Ernest Tennant, and Philip Conwell-Evans were the founders of the Fellowship and are the chief focus of this story. Philip Kerr Lord Lothian was Connell-Evans first political recruit. As Lloyd George’s secretary at the Versailles peace conference in 1918, Lothian had drafted the notorious “war guilt”clause, holding Germany responsible for the outbreak of hostilities, yet he never lost his conviction that the French had been needlessly harsh on the vanquished Germans. He was far from the stereotype of the declining aristocratic reactionary, being firmly on the political left, and made a wonderful ambassador to the United States in later years. As Hitler moved closer and closer to open hostility, these four men realized that the price the Nazis wanted was too high. To different degrees, they turned their considerable talents to support first Chamberlain and then Churchill to avoid conflict. Unfortunately, history remembers the appeasement, not the turn-around. 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.
How the British might have handled Hitler differently remains one of history's greatest 'what ifs'... Historians writing about the years immediately before Adolf Hitler’s war have to contend with two problems: hindsight and the common and dangerous conflation of Germans and Nazis. It was the German state, not the Nazi party, that went to war in 1939 (though of course the state was under Nazi control) and the vast majority who were not Nazis kept their heads down to avoid ending up in a concentration camp or worse. Almost all of those who ended up at the end of a rope at Nuremberg, took the suicide pill or escaped to South America, were committed party members – with all that entailed. How might the British have handled Hitler differently?” remains one of history’s greatest “what ifs."As a result, a number of Hitler’s provocative acts, notably his intentions towards the Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia, were known to Vansittart and the government in London long before they were executed – either because civilised Germans had warned AGF members about what was going on, or loudmouths such as Ribbentrop or Hermann Goering (the latter being the closest the AGF considered the Nazis had to a gent) had boasted about them. The trouble was that the government regarded Vansittart as a troublemaker and chose not to believe him.