TELEVISION: Churchill and his war
Conspiracy & The Gathering Storm
The BBC recently repeated two outstanding historical films from 2002, and it’s worth considering these additions to the Corporation’s public service balance sheet.
Conspiracy
This is the story of the Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942, at which the extermination of the European Jews was planned. The exterior scenes were shot at Wannsee itself, a formerly Jewish-owned mansion outside Berlin, which Heydrich wanted for his own use after the war. The interior scenes were filmed in a studio set, a careful reconstruction of the actual conference room at Wannsee. As the real conference lasted only two hours, the film takes place almost in real time.
The conference takes place in the snow. Hitler’s armies have come to a grinding halt before the gates of Moscow, and his ablest general, von Reichenau, has just died of a heart attack (Reichenau had just taken over as Commander of Army Group South, whilst also retaining command of his own Sixth Army — the same army which would be surrounded and destroyed at Stalingrad a year later. It is ironic to think how events might turned out differently had he lived). Unmentioned in the film, perhaps because Hitler had not realised what he had let himself in for, Hitler had also just declared war on the United States. Rather than concentrate on these events, which in the long run had sealed the fate of the Nazi regime, Hitler has ordered the extermination of the Jews, and the conference has been called to implement the decision.
No major figures were present, apart from Heydrich. Why Hitler and the Nazi bigwigs felt the need to keep the Final Solution a secret (only one record of the conference survived, and that by accident) is an issue not explored by this film, whose approach is simply to let the facts speak for themselves.
In fact the shooting of Jews — or even standing aside while the local population conducted pogroms — by SS-einsatzgruppen had already started in Latvia. Lange, the SS officer responsible, is present at the conference (not mentioned by the film, Lange had also been responsible for the euthanasia of the mentally-ill in East Prussia). The construction of the death camps had also begun. The purpose of the meeting is to ensure the co-operation of the relevant agencies (Gestapo, Foreign Office, administration of occupied territories, Four Year Economic Plan, etc) as the production-line process of extermination begins.
The meeting is organised by Eichmann, played by Stanley Tucci, the only American in the cast. He is a banal man (as Hannah Arendt was later to observe) who shouts at servants, slaps enlisted men and sneers nastily at classical music (Schubert’s Quintet, one of my own personal favourites as it happens). He is a familiar type — the nasty little man who, when given more authority than is good for him, turns into a nasty little bully.
The main character of the film is none of these things. Reinhard Heydrich (played by Kenneth Branagh) is a smooth, charming, commanding leader. Having flown his own plane from Prague, where he was Governor, to Wannsee, he asserts his superiority by making a dramatic late entrance. We are given a vertical view as Branagh sweeps off his cap at the beginning to reveal a head of blonde, Aryan hair, a joke for the audience which reminded me irresistibly of the opening scene of Once Upon a Time in the West where a child has just been cold-bloodedly murdered, and the camera pans back revealing his killer to be — ‘Mr. Nice Guy’, Henry Fonda.
Heydrich, known as the ‘Blonde Beast’, was used by Hitler as a hatchet man, for he seemed to have no conscience. Unmentioned by the film, he had been involved in the murder of Roehm in 1934, Kristallnacht in 1938 and the faked Polish ‘attack’ on Germany in 1939. Why such an obviously able man, who would have risen to the top of any organisation in any era, should be guilty of such atrocious crimes, is a question which the film does not pose. Perhaps such psychopathic tendencies lurk in many ambitious men, and are only kept from coming to the fore by social restraints and established rules and institutions. Heydrich chairs the meeting with pretence of free discussion (allowing breaks for drinks when necessary to allow tempers to cool) while steering the participants to his own conclusions. At the end of the meeting all those present, one by one, are required to actively voice their agreement to what has been discussed, a procedure which will be wincingly familiar to those with experience of working for a large business corporation.
Several of the men around the table have doubts, expressed with varying degrees of openness, about the enormity of what is being done. The two civilians present, one a Foreign Office official, the other the lawyer Stuckart (author of Nuremberg Laws, and played by Colin Firth) come closest to expressing their feelings, and are brought back into line by discreet threats from Heydrich, who knows the use that the regime can make of clever men. One Gestapo chief has a queasy turn in the lavatory. Unfortunately he was played by the actor who played the comic character Mr. Wemmick in a recent TV adaptation of Great Expectations, which caused a brief halt to my suspension of disbelief, but it was an effective enough scene all the same. Yet by the end of the film all these men have given their assent to what is being proposed, not least because it is the next logical progression from the persecution to which the Jews have already been subjected. I was reminded of the saying that no man ever loses his soul at once, but in small steps.
Those present are obsessed with legality (talking of Jews being ‘1/4 mixed’ or ‘1/8 mixed’) and euphemisms (Jews are to be ‘Evacuated’ not exterminated). At one moment, somebody asks how many qualified lawyers are around the table — almost everyone present, most of them SS or Party officials, raises his hand. There is ludicrous talk about sterilising Jews by X-Ray, or about what colour the corpses turn in gas ovens.
As the Schubert Quintet plays at the end of the film, the fates of the characters are listed. Heydrich was assassinated by British-trained agents in 1942 (and Himmler, who feared him, was apparently glad to see the back of him). Eichmann was hanged by the Israelis. Lange and one or two others were hanged at Nuremberg, while most (including Stuckart, who denied having attended the conference) were imprisoned. Another was among the million Germans killed by Allied bombing. One character's fate intrigued me: the thuggish aide to Martin Bormann, who had threatened Stuckart, died in 1987 — having worked as a tax advisor. Truly, I thought, the banality of evil.
The Gathering Storm
More superficially enjoyable, but ultimately less thought-provoking was The Gathering Storm, the story of Churchill’s campaign between 1934 and 1937 to draw attention to the German building of the Luftwaffe, aided by secret information leaked to him by Major Desmond Morton (Jim Broadbent — always good value) and a Foreign Office official, Ralph Wigram (Linus Roach). We are left in no doubt, from the sonorous opening music, of whose side we are supposed to be on. Churchill is shown climbing a hill to see a splendid vision of his ancestor, the first Duke of Marlborough, fighting the Battle of Blenheim. This turns out to be a dream — Churchill then awakens, walks naked to the bathroom (seen from behind in all his glory, the camera beneath the bed), then rehearses that evening’s House of Commons speech whilst relieving himself. Perhaps this is meant to indicate Churchill’s down-to-earthness, but it is hard to imagine a French film portraying General de Gaulle in quite such a manner.
The film captures Thirties upper-class domestic life quite well. Besides his opening nude scene, Churchill is also later shown taking a bath in front of his long-suffering butler ‘Inches’ (Ronnie Barker), who is expected to stay in the bathroom and wait on his master — not quite Louis XIV expecting to have his chamberpot held for him, but not far off. Yet, in a telling exchange, Inches later tells the other servants that if Baldwin succeeds in having Churchill deselected, he ‘will never vote Conservative again’.
Albert Finney gives a superb and convincing portrayal of Churchill. He had, he confessed, studied old 1930s newsreels to get the voice and stance right. In the film Churchill has turned sixty, and has suddenly become old (unmentioned by the film, he had played polo up until the age of fifty, and, to judge from photographs, had remained fit and vigorous until at least the end of the 1920s). His daughter is getting divorced, his wife is fed up with him, his only son Randolph is already drinking far too much and frittering his life away. His campaign against the granting of provincial self-government to India, although popular with Conservative activists, has taken him further and further away from any prospect of leading the Conservative Party, and has reduced him to delivering his thundering speeches at midnight to an almost empty House of Commons. He is obsessed by writing the life of his ancestor Marlborough.
Vanessa Redgrave is also excellent as Clementine Churchill — steel-willed in a feminine way, standing up to her strong-willed husband and on two occasions hurling plates of food at him. We are given a very convincing portrait of a warm and affectionate marriage (Mr. Pug & Mrs. PussyCat, as they called one another), but at the time of the film they seem to have been having something of a rough patch, after which she brought her husband to his senses by going without him on a cruise to the South Seas, during which she may have had an affair and contemplated leaving him.
The film does dwell on Churchill’s financial worries. He insisted on living like a millionaire, but had lost his capital in the 1929 Wall Street Crash. His ‘writing’, most of it collating the work of underpaid research assistants, netted him a huge income — actually the film, unlike the late Roy Jenkins’ recent biography, doesn’t capture just how vast his journalistic output actually was in the early 1930s. He had an income equivalent to hundreds of thousands of pounds a year, in today’s money, and one can only wonder at the colossal extravagance with which he wasted it. The huge cost of running his house Chartwell (which he had been reduced to trying to sell by the end of the 1930s, until bailed out by a Jewish financier Sir Henry Strakosch) cannot have helped: we are shown about twenty servants at the end of the film — the wages bill alone would have to have been a huge chunk of his after-tax income. His financial problems must have been more deep-seated than could have been solved by eliminating Dundee Cake at teatime, or cutting down to one bottle of champagne at dinner. But then Churchill always did believe that expenditure should be adjusted to meet outgoings, not the other way around.
The real problem with this film is the simplified view which it gives of the political issues. Stanley Baldwin (played by Derek Jacobi), the villain of the piece, is little more than a caricature, and is portrayed as a weak and nervous man — which may have been the underlying reality, but which does justice neither to his motivation (a sincere horror of war) and to the image of stolid strength behind which he concealed his political skill. Part of the problem is that Derek Jacobi is simply not fat enough: Baldwin sported an immense belly by 1930s, which contributed to his (wholly put on) Walpole-like image. But the problems run deeper than that.
No serious historian would now argue that the governments of the 1930s were led by fools who ‘failed to rearm’ because they ‘didn’t listen to Churchill’. Britain, as it happens, did rearm gradually during the 1930s, as much as she could afford, with the emphasis largely on aircraft and tanks rather than the mass land armies of 1916-18 (such a massive British infantry commitment to France, the one thing which might actually have deterred Germany from attacking, was politically unfeasible after the memories of the First World War). Many of the tanks turned out to be useless junk, but the aircraft won the Battle of Britain. What was not foreseeable was the collapse of France in 1940 — the two sides were roughly equal in strength, and Hitler won not because he had more armaments but because of better tactics and the weakness of French morale. Churchill certainly did not foresee it: ‘Thank God for the French Army’ he was in the habit of declaring, a prediction at least as wrong as any of Stanley Baldwin’s. Should Britain have built even more armaments? Hardly. Total war, when it came, bankrupted the country by end of 1940, leaving Britain dependent on Lend-Lease (ie. American handouts) for an entire year before the USA officially entered the war.
Many other things are omitted from the film. The silliness of Churchill’s views on India is not spelled out: some form of self-government was inevitable by the 1930s, and had World War Two not put an end to British power in the Far East a self-governing India (and Australia), might have carried along under Britain’s umbrella for a few generations longer. Nor, the India Act having passed, are we shown Churchill’s angling for office in 1935-7 (he hoped for office, preferably as Minister for Defence Co-ordination), when Baldwin succeeded MacDonald as Prime Minister in the summer of 1935, after the election that autumn, and again in the crisis after the Hoare-Laval Pact. It was better for his reputation that he was disappointed. Nor are we shown the utter fool Churchill made of himself over the abdication crisis in 1936, when he backed Edward VIII and was shouted down in the House of Commons, destroying all the progress he had made in rehabilitating himself. Nor do we see the events of the mid Thirties, in which Britain, for reasons of realpolitik, stood aside from the Spanish Civil War, or from Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia — both policies which caused outrage on the left, which was as ever quick to condemn immoral regimes but slow to will the means to fight them, but neither of which Churchill seems particularly to have objected to.
Part of the point of studying history seriously is to acquire a fuller understanding than is provided by the bundle of myths which pass for ‘history’ in the popular imagination. Inspiring Churchill’s leadership in 1940 may have been, but if he had been listened to in 1934 (as my school history teacher, a major from the Normandy campaign, never tired of pointing out) Britain would have been saddled in 1939 with a fleet of obsolete biplane bombers — and probably fewer Hurricanes and Spitfires. His views on India and on rearmament were both based on a similar exaggeration of British capabilities, no more realistic than his plans to protect Czechoslovakia and Poland by allying with the USSR.
In 1909 Churchill, then President of the Board of Trade, had opposed an increase in naval spending. He later wrote that he had been ‘right in the narrow sense’ but ‘absolutely wrong in relation to the deep tides of destiny’. The same might be said of his opponents in the 1930s. It may be that Churchill may have sensed in some deep way that Hitler was, as Robert Blake put it, ‘a creature from the abyss’ like Genghis Khan. But in the mid-1930s it just wasn’t clear that Hitler planned to do any more than raise Germany back to continental power status, and it is hard to see how public opinion would have stood for a more hawkish policy towards Germany. Like many myths, the Churchill ‘Wilderness’ legend serves the purpose of glossing over unpalatable truths.
By the time the film ends, amidst sonorous music, we have jumped to Churchill’s return to the Admiralty in 1939, omitting the entire premiership of Neville Chamberlain. The film was clearly made with a view to the American market, where Churchill is regarded in conservative circles with an idolatry which cannot fail to raise a smile this side of the Atlantic. But it’s jolly inspiring viewing all the same.
James Steerforth works in the City
James Steerforth, January 17, 2003 10:36 AM