Best of Enemies: Britain and Germany - 100 Years of Truth and Lies [Hardcover]

Richard Milton writes with some feeling and the book's power reflects the anger he feels with the deceptions practised by the ruling classes. Like him I grew up believing all Germans are bad by definition, an assumption not dispelled until I visited the country in my 20's and found more of a natural bond with them than, say, the French. The book gets a little repetitive as the author clings stubbornly on to the idea that ordinary Britons did the right thing in fighting and killing our anglo saxon cousins, in spite of his own mounting evidence to the contrary. His views are also a little idiosyncratic at times, for example on the importance of Edward Bernays. Still, it's honestly written and well worth reading.

Rchard Milton is an original thinker par excellence, and this carefully crafted book shines a spotlight on an unusual aspect of Anglo-German relations. Most Brits are aware that the British royal family originally came from Germany. But how many know about the deep social, philosophical and scientific ties which bound the country closely together up until the eve of the First World War, and again between 1918 and 1939? Milton shows how the Nazi leadership studied and admired Britain - and how some Britons admired the Nazis, in return; and how British thinking in areas as varied as the Boy Scout movement and the growth of empire influenced events in Germany.

Summary: a good read for anyone interested in German-British relations.

If "Best of Enemies" were a book written by a German historian, chances are he would run into difficulties finding a publisher, or worse. For that reason alone, Richard Milton's text is a welcome addition to the series of books on British-German relations published in England in recent years. One has the impression that the authors as well as their readers, are still puzzled by the upsurge of negative attitudes towards Germany which took place in Britain in the second half of the 19th century after an extended period of cultural and economic exchanges at many levels of society. Even today, it is not quite clear how this antagonism came or was brought about, Milton's book depicts only the results but does not look into the causes.

Milton presents the hodge-podge of lies, half-truths and truths used for political purposes, primarily in connection with the two world wars. On account of the fact that propaganda touched on a large number of fields, Milton's book is more a panorama than a scientific analysis of his subject. He considers mainly the British side of the issue and finds that in many cases, the enemy was accused of misdeeds whose roots could be found in Anglo-Saxon soil.

A case very much in point is the topic of racial superiority and the means proposed and employed to achieve and maintain it; the author fathoms in detail the depth to which these ideas had permeated scientific and intellectual circles all over the Western world, carried along by the currents Darwin's theories had generated. Hitler and his men did not have far to go in their philosophy, all they had to do was to draw the logical conclusions from previous work and apply them rigorously.

Even if other countries did not go to such extremes, Miltons states that many nations used forcible methods in their efforts to reduce and contain the spread of hereditary illnesses; he writes that during the first half of the 20th century for example, 60,000 people were sterilized in the USA, most of them against their will and most of them either Black or Indian, or that Sweden had such laws on its books until 1975 and applied them without much restraint.

Aside from the question of eugenics and its widespread abuses, the author concentrates on the methods used by politicians as they tried to generate support for their ideas among the masses. He goes back to that other great philosophical stimulus of Darwin's century - Sigmund Freud and his theories - and establishes a link between Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, and Dr. Joseph Goebbels.

Even if Milton's evidence is a bit tenuous for proving any direct influence of Bernays on Goebbels' propaganda, Milton underlines how well the work of the two men meshed and says explicitly (p. 245f) that "Goebbels rarely resorted to lies". This was absolutely in line with Bernays' principle that the best way to get people to believe you is to make sure they believe you are telling them the truth. Milton goes so far as to affirm that in dealing with the German people, Goebbels exhibited a "pathological honesty" which he also imposed on other members of Hitler's circle; as an example, he quotes from Goebbels' speech after the Stalingrad catastrophe. The passages quoted ring prophetic, in more ways than one.

This line of approach is set off against propaganda methods used by the Allies who, Milton says, ever since WW1 had a machine spinning tales of atrocities of any imaginable kind and depicting their enemy in the most hideous way. The problem with this approach was that the average person eventually accepted these stories and developed a hatred which far outlived both the end of the hostilities and any later disclaimers.

In fact, these beliefs are still very much with us, not only in the countries of the former Allies. They have led to a strange phenomenon initially observed in hostages: the captives came to accept the motives of their captors. As time went on, the victims of the slanderous propaganda who had themselves gone through the hell inflicted on them in the Second World War, found solace in the belief that, in the light of what they themselves had done, the other side could not but proceed in the way they did even if their actions were appalling. The victims apparently felt that without this reassuring thought they would be facing an absolutely lawless world of dog-eat-dog.

Fortunately, Milton, in one of his final chapters offers us a safe haven, undisturbed by the hue-and-cry of battles - money. He tells us that in May of 1944, when the Allies prepared their final assault on the Reich, a meeting of the board of directors of the Bank of International Settlements took place in Switzerland, with executive staff from all sides sitting around the table: Germans, Americans, Japanese, Brits and Italians all joined to sort out the difficult legacy of the war, in terms of finances. We learn that US firms had considerable stakes in the German economy and managed throughout the war to circumvent governmental restrictions, both American and German, through confidential deals which often involved pacts with people otherwise considered unsavoury, such as Walter Schellenberg, SS-Brigadeführer and Special Assistant to Himmler.

The conclusion of the book is that in spite of the enormous war effort, both visible and less so, set in motion by the British government, Britain was lucky to find herself among the winners in 1945, at least on the glossy photographs. Internally, the situation was far from what had been aimed for five years earlier, and the price was staggering, not so much in terms of material cost, but in prestige and credibility. The last sentence of the book states that we are still suffering from an evil conceived in Britain earlier on - "the official lie".