Pictured: ‘An Indian ruler reviewing a guard of honour of the army occupying his country.’ — Gerwin Strobl

To quote only a brief selection of examples from Gerwin Strobl’s The Germanic Isle: Nazi Perceptions of Britain, pages 61–6:

The precise basis of Hitler’s admiration for Britain — the […] ruthlessness and absence of moral scruples — remained hidden through much of the 1930s. To have revealed it to the wider world might have invited unwelcome conclusions about the Third Reich’s own intentions. Mein Kampf contained very little about Britain, and the Second Book with its references to the Anglo‐Saxon ‘genius’ at territorial expansion was never published.¹

Hitler’s public utterances after 1933 were also — deliberately — unenlightening in this regard. The fiction of a peace‐loving government seeking only modest revisions to the terms of Versailles was crucial at first to the régime’s survival. This demanded a degree of circumspection. Yet the leadership’s fascination with the British Empire was no secret. The Empire had been the only British topic regularly touched upon by the party’s intellectuals in their speeches and journalism during the Weimar years.

[…]

The suggested lessons from British history became more explicit as the régime gained in self‐confidence. In the autumn of 1936, for instance, [the Third Reich’s] main illustrated weekly newspaper, the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung discussed, at length, the Fashoda crisis of 1898. Memories of past Anglo‐French discord were no doubt part of the attraction (and this particular instance was within living memory). The focus of the article was, however, firmly on Britain’s handling of the crisis.

This culminated in the thought that “when the moment came, Britain seized the opportunity brutally’.⁶ The link — in language alone — with Hitler’s views about Britain is obvious. And the fact that this article appeared in the wake of German armies re‐entering the Rhineland is surely no coincidence either. It suggests that for all the [Fascist] rhetoric about an ‘unprecedented age’, some party members saw the Third Reich following where other imperial powers had led.⁷

This would later become quite explicit: when the rump Czech state was occupied in March 1939, it was not annexed outright. Instead, a so‐called Protectorate was proclaimed: an institution for which there was no real precedent in German history.⁸ Allowing the Czechs all the trappings of independence, from postage stamps to presidential guard, was not just designed to facilitate collaboration.

The fiction of Czech self‐government under the ‘protection’ of the Reich was intended above all for British eyes. For the new dispensation in Prague was a deliberate mirror image of Britain’s own relations with the so‐called Princely States in India. President Hacha, it was implied, would now receive avuncular guidance from Baron Neurath in much the same way that Indian maharajahs were assisted in governing their states by British Residents.⁹

Creating such parallels was an act of conscious malice. Britain, it was hoped, could thus be shamed into silent acquiescence.¹⁰ (When this hope proved elusive, Goebbels promptly charged Britain with ‘hypocrisy’:¹¹ or, as one newspaper put it in Shakespearean tones, ‘hypocrisy, thy name is England’.)¹²

If the allusions to British imperial practice failed to bring the hoped‐for benefits abroad, they were rather more useful domestically. The account in 1936 of the Fashoda crisis is a perfect illustration. The [Fascist] government’s systematic breach of international agreements did not just provoke alarm abroad. It also caused concern at home. The quarrel was with the means rather than the objectives of the regime’s foreign policy.

Few Germans would have questioned their government’s moral right to reoccupy the Rhineland, to recover Danzig and Memel, or to demand self‐determination for the Sudetenland. Risking war in pursuit of such aims was another matter. And joy over the successful resolution of one crisis did not necessarily lessen anxieties at the onset of the next.¹³ It is here that Britain’s imperial record proved useful to [Fascist] propaganda.

British history, the régime suggested to its subjects, had demonstrated time and again that the use of force — or the threat of it — was the surest way of safeguarding national interests. And as Britain’s international standing proved, this approach did not preclude diplomatic respectability. On the contrary, it was essential in securing and maintaining Great Power status. What had worked for Britain would now also work for the Third Reich.

On reflection, it is striking how ingenious the apparently random choice of Fashoda was in 1936. Comparing the crises on the Rhine and the Nile made the Third Reich seem moderate. It had, after all, in the famous phrase, ‘merely invaded its own front garden’. Events at Fashoda, on the other hand, had been an undisguised exercise in imperial expansion. Britain had had neither legal nor substantive moral rights in the Sudan.

And if European claims were to be admitted, French claims on the Nile were no less credible than those of Britain. But British interests were at stake, and all other considerations duly took second place.¹⁴

This is a recognisable echo of Hitler’s familiar pseudo‐Darwinist views. Yet the significance of this article lies less in its content than in its ill‐disguised objective: the attempt to influence public opinion in Germany by invoking the real or supposed British example. This was done in a spirit not of envy or resentment, but of frank admiration (even in 1939, amid deteriorating Anglo‐German relations, the SS newspaper Das Schwarze Korps invited its readership to learn from Britain’s road to worldwide influence).¹⁵ If the Reich was to achieve a status comparable to that of Britain, it would have to equal Britain’s single‐minded pursuit of power.

This intention is even more evident in a second article on imperial history published by the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung. This formed part of the same series of articles in the autumn of 1936.

Before the paper turned to events at Fashoda, it had examined the beginnings of British India. Here, too, potential lessons were discovered. And it was, inevitably, the morally questionable exploits of India’s first British rulers that provided the focus of interest. “Men, such as Clive and Hastings’, the paper observed, ‘have often been called adventurers, desperados and murderers’. But this was to miss the point: ‘they should be seen, fundamentally, ‘as great statesmen who in all their actions were mindful only of the interests of their country’.¹⁶

[…]

Germany did not simply move from the arrogance of the Kaiser to the hubris of Hitler. In between lay a period of grave self‐doubt, which all the patriotic bluster of the Weimar right could never quite disguise. As the twenties wore on and the German republic (and most of continental Europe) moved uneasily from crisis to crisis, Britain’s comparative stability stood out. The root of German admiration was therefore simply British power. And the most tangible expression of British power was the British Empire.

Put at its simplest, the Empire epitomised success to many German eyes, in much the same way that the new German republic embodied national failure. Perhaps inevitably, analyses of British policies and institutions — ‘of how the English do things’ in the words of one Weimar‐era book — tended to be undertaken with more than half an eye on Germany itself.¹⁷ The diarist Viktor Klemperer, for instance, records in 1920 a dinner‐party conversation about British ‘colonial methods’; his host, a prominent banker, promptly contrasted British success with German failure.¹⁸

This, Klemperer felt, complemented related observations by the great Anglist Wilhelm Dibelius: the British Empire, it will be remembered, had featured prominently at the Conference of Modern Linguists at Halle that year. What is interesting about this is not so much the topic as the tone. Neither Dibelius nor Klemperer were noticeably unpatriotic (Klemperer at one stage hoped he might still be fit enough to enlist in the coming war of revenge).

The sentiments Klemperer recorded, and his own calm response to them, are therefore noteworthy: there was — less than two years after Versailles — a frank admission of German shortcomings in the former colonies, rather than complaints about their loss through Allied iniquity. ‘The colonial crime of Versailles’, as [Fascist] propaganda would later call it, did not prevent a cool assessment of Britain’s success.¹⁹

Though the practicalities of colonial rule would in due course capture the imagination of the [NSDAP] (and, particularly, that of its leader), the colonies were for a long time purely a side issue. Not even Hitler at first was able to detect the direct relevance of British colonial methods to inter‐war Germany. Instead, the focus of interest lay in the power that had created and now sustained the Empire. It was here that German observers hoped to derive lessons for Germany.

Wilhelm Dibelius, who perhaps more than any other Anglist shaped German perceptions of Britain after the Great War, detected useful lessons. He pointed particularly to the political arena. The British, it seemed to him, possessed as a nation a unique ‘feel’ for politics: a strong ‘political instinct’.²⁰ This he contrasted with the situation in Germany both before and after 1918. Dibelius was influential not just in educational circles.²¹

One catches clear echoes of his sentiments in Hitler’s Second Book: ‘If the Earth today holds a British Empire this is because there currently exists no nation more suited [to rule] by virtue of its general political characteristics and the average political intelligence [of its individual members]’.²²

There is a distinct irony to Hitler’s enthusiasm: Weimar Anglisten also regularly praised British ‘common sense’,²³ ‘self‐mastery’ and personal ‘restraint’.²⁴ Such inconsistencies are to be expected: Hitler, throughout his career, was adept at picking the plums out of any pudding and ignoring (ultimately to his cost) what he found less palatable. In spite of obvious contradictions between the Anglisten and the future Führer therefore, there existed some common ground between them: it lay in the belief that Germany could benefit from the British example.

Hence, quoting Alexander Dallin’s German Rule in Russia, 1941–1945, page 7:

Hitler continued, ‘if we speak of new lands, we are bound to think first of Russia and her border states’.²

His favourite analogy in this connection was a comparison of the future German East with British India.³ To him, India provided an object lesson of colonial exploitation and Machiavellian virtuosity; he used it to buttress his conviction that the population of ‘Germany’s India’ — the Soviet Union — was likewise no more than ‘white slaves’ destined to serve the master race.

Characteristic of his landlocked outlook, he proclaimed that Germany’s primary colonies were to be found not overseas but in Russia.⁴ Along with its manpower, the resources of the East were to assure the material well‐being of the German people.

Of course, this is not to say that the Fascists approved of London’s cumbersome pseudodemocracy, and the British Empire’s methods were, at times, too moderate for them. Quoting Patrick J. Buchanan’s Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War”: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, page 186:

After lunch, Halifax brought up his experiences as viceroy of India, where he had urged a policy of conciliation. Hitler, who had just related how Lives of a Bengal Lancer was his favorite film, and compulsory viewing for the SS to show “how a superior race must behave,” rudely interrupted him.
“Shoot Gandhi!”
A startled Halifax fell silent, as Hitler went into a rant:
“Shoot Gandhi! And if that does not suffice to reduce them to submission, shoot a dozen leading members of Congress; and if that does not suffice, shoot 200 and so on until order is established.”

In spite of these differences, the German Fascists long dreamt of allying with the British Empire at the earliest possible opportunity. Page 325:

To Hitler, Great Britain was Germany’s natural ally and the nation and empire he most admired. He did not covet British colonies. He did not want or seek a fleet to rival the Royal Navy. He did not wish to bring down the British Empire. He was prepared to appease Britain to make her a friend of [the Third Reich]. Where the Kaiser had grudgingly agreed in 1913 to restrict the High Seas Fleet to 60 percent of the Royal Navy, Hitler in 1935 readily agreed to restrict his navy to 35 percent. What Hitler ever sought was an allied, friendly, or at least neutral Britain.

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

It was only after London repeatedly rejected his offers that his opinion on the English soured. But the damage had already been done: while Fascist Italy might have served as a better overall model for the Third Reich, the British Empire, together with Imperial America and the previous Reichs, all continued to function as important sources of inspiration for the German Fascists.

The British Empire in particular proved that the ‘white race’ could dominate the globe, and like the late Ottoman Empire, it proved that oppressors could face no more than minimal consequences for their atrocities. If the largest empire in all of history could sprout from this quaint little isle, what was to inhibit the Fascists from repeating this success?