Robert
Boothby to Winston Churchill
22 January 1932 17 Pall Mall
Dear Winston,
Many thanks for your cable. I am so relieved to hear you are now
well on the road to recovery. But I fear it may be a tedious business,
because you will not have begun to feel the full shock effects
until quite recently.
I remember when I had my miserable little accident a couple of
years ago. I though I had quite got over it until about three weeks
later I started not sleeping, and for a time my nerves went all
to blazes.
The only thing to do is to take it easy for a bit and I do hope
you will.
Your Daily Mail articles made one feel that one had been through
every stage of the accident with you, and caused a tremendous stir
over here. What a time you have had.
It may be that you have not suffered greatly from delayed shock.
But you must have had some. I found it comforting, in moments of
the more savage depression, to reflect that there was a definite
physical cause for my psychological condition, and - although this
was more difficult to believe - that it was only a passing phase.
I've just got back from Germany, where I had a most interesting
time.
They asked me to lecture in Hamburg and Berlin; and I had one
audience of over 800 students, to whom I opened up on the values
of democracy and personal liberty, as opposed to either fascism,
communism, or the Roman Catholic Church!
They took it very well.
God intended them to be the docile and contented inhabitants of
a series of bourgeois democratic states; but they were turned upside
down by that filthy military clique and bogus Potsdam aristocracy.
Now they are in a hopeless mess. The have no 'flair' for politics;
and their parties are a mad jumble of conflicting forces and theories,
based on institutions like the Trade Unions and the Catholic Church,
which ought to be outside the business altogether.
But as a people they are tremendously formidable still, and I
don't blame the French for being frightened.
In Berlin I saw both Brüning and Hitler; and enclose an article
I wrote for The Evening Standard, in case it should interest you.
At the end of my talk with Hitler I asked him what he was going
to do to the Jews, and there was a grand scene, like a Bateman
cartoon. Eventually he said he would veto 'pogroms', which wasn't
altogether reassuring. I told him that if he beat them up, it wouldn't
go down at all well in England, where we encouraged them to govern
us. And afterwards a secretary confided to me that some of his
more enthusiastic supporters had committed him a good deal farther
than he intended to go.
The two things that impressed me most were their workers houses,
which are magnificent; and their orderly desperation.
I sat next to a very nice young chap at dinner - a partner in
Wassermanns Bank - and he said the most 'hopeful' characteristic
of the younger generation in Germany was their fundamental desperation.
The older people were lost without a foothold. But his own generation
had never known security. They were thankful for anything - especially
a good meal - and ready for anything, because they never knew what
the morrow would bring.
Another man, also at the dinner, was manager of a chemical factory
which was going into liquidation. I asked him if he was depressed,
and he said "I can never be depressed again. I was captured by
the Russians in 1915. I spent 9 months in Turkistan. Then I was
sent to Siberia. I made enough money at woodwork to buy four horses
and a sledge. I escaped and got to the Polish frontier in the winter
of 1916-17, where I was recaptured.
Then I went to Vladivostock, and escaped again when the revolution
came. I had to earn my living first under Koltchak, and then under
the Bolsheviks; and I didn't get back here till 1920.
After that I can't burst myself over the liquidation of a Chemical
factory."
Brüning told me that he believed that the payment of reparations & international
debts was fatal to the economic equilibrium of the world, and aggravated
the currency difficulty: but that in any case no Chancellor who
agreed to further payments would live for an hour in Germany. He
pins his faith to a change in the French attitude after the elections;
and said he would rather have the whole question shelved until
the summer or autumn. He seems to have succeeded in this. But his
outlook for the future is, on the face of it, unduly optimistic.
My warm regards to Mrs. Churchill, and best wishes for a successful
tour - when it starts.
Yours ever
Bob
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