WINSTON CHURCHILL - without legend
Civis Mundi # 163 (november 2025)
Otto van de Haar
Dietmar Pieper, Churchill und die Deutschen. Eine besondere Beziehung (2024). Piper Publishing.
The world-famous British wartime prime minister Winston Churchill (1874-1965) was not only
courageous, pragmatic, democratic, and extremely strong-willed. He was also quick-tempered, conceited, very foul-mouthed, unpredictable, at times depressive and euphoric, martial, eager for fame for himself and ‘his’ British Empire, authoritarian and bursting with a desire for recognition. His much-praised ‘mercy’ towards the defeated enemy after two world wars was not unrelated to
strategic considerations.
He came from a wealthy aristocratic family; a distant ancestor was the famous
general and statesman John Churchill, in whose footsteps he wanted to follow. Little Winston had
a loveless childhood. On his father's side, he was cruelly dismissed as a nobody; Churchill's
pleading notes to his distant mother for attention and love, written from
a gloomy British boarding school where corporal punishment was difficult to avoid, are poignant.
Churchill showed less bravado towards the female sex, but he eventually managed to put his
shyness aside and win over Clementine Hozier - affectionately called ‘Clemmie’ by him -
and ask her to marry him. They remained together for the rest of their lives. Clementine
and Winston were very fond of each other and, in a way, bound to each other.
They had one son and four daughters.
Churchill died in 1965, sixty years ago, at the age of ninety. With a brief
interruption, he was represented in the House of Commons from 1900 onwards: among other things as Minister of the Navy (twice), War and Air Force, Colonies, and Home Affairs. He was
a member of the Conservative Party, but they only half trusted him, because in 1904 he had already left that party for the Liberal Party, only to return to the Conservatives twenty years later.
This was highly unusual at the time. He was considered too individualistic and
unpredictable. In the 1930s, he was therefore not offered a ministerial post and ended up
on the backbench. From here, he increasingly criticized his own Conservative government's
policy of appeasement towards Hitler's Germany.
During the Second World War, he held the key positions of Prime Minister and Minister of Defense
in the five-member War Cabinet. After the war, when Labour came to power, he remained
leader of the opposition for six years and served as Prime Minister for a final term from 1951 to 1955. After that—he was already approaching eighty—his influence declined rapidly.
It is a minor miracle that he lived to such an advanced age. Every hour, he would place his famous sturdy cigar between his strong-willed lips. It had become a symbolic attribute, somewhat
reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher's ever-present handbag.
Moreover, he was more or less under the influence for much of the day. In 1943, shortly after an
important meeting with Stalin and Roosevelt in Tehran, according to Pieper, Churchill had to stay in bed due to pneumonia. The private nurse on duty reported his ‘fluid intake’:
280 ml of champagne [breakfast],
almost 60 ml of brandy,
230 ml of orange juice,
and 230 ml of whiskey soda.
Klaus Mann, who was strongly attracted to Churchill's somewhat archaic-sounding, rhetorically clever war speeches, once had the opportunity to experience him up close. Upon seeing his ‘bulldog face reddened by alcohol’, the German writer was somewhat
disturbed.
For relaxation, Churchill occasionally painted not unworthy landscapes and
cityscapes and also practiced ‘wall building’, but the results of this
caused more than one smile.
When his busy schedule allowed, he spent long periods in his favorite part of southern France, where he continued his painting and sometimes visited a casino in Monte Carlo or Biarritz.
Long after the war, when he had become ‘the Greatest Briton of all time’, he went, writes Pieper, more than once aboard the superyacht of his great friend, the Greek shipping magnate
Aristotle ‘Ari’ Onassis, for a cruise on the Mediterranean and, on a few occasions, even
all the way to the Caribbean. Paintings could be admired throughout this yacht:
a Vermeer, a Gauguin, an El Greco and - a Churchill. This painting—a lovely forest stream—
which Ari had received as a gift from Winston, was in any case “real” and not a forgery.
Churchill was also an exceptionally prolific and compelling writer on major historical
events, in which he did not forget to include himself. His historical books and
war reporting did extremely well on the market and earned him considerable sums of money.
This was necessary because Churchill was constantly in financial difficulties due to his extravagance.
In 1953, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature: 'For his mastery of historical and biographical
descriptions, as well as for his brilliant rhetoric in defending lofty human
values'.
However, his greatest passion lay in another area.
Ruthless warfare
Dietmar Pieper (Mainz, 1963) is a Germanist and works in the foreign affairs department of Der
Spiegel. In his analytical biography, he shows how much Churchill loved warfare. And that's
not all; he knew no mercy. In 1914, for example—when he was forty—the German
Empire invaded Belgium and France, prompting the United Kingdom to launch a counterattack. The Reich under Kaiser Wilhelm II had long been “searching for a new world order” with the necessary provocations and a robust Flottenbau, but London would not allow it. 'Britannia rules
the waves' – not Germany. At the outbreak of this (first) hegemonic war on the continent,
Churchill was overjoyed. The politician David Lloyd George, ten years his senior,
from the Liberal Party, to which Churchill had moved in 1904, aptly described his
warmongering, according to Pieper:
'Winston stormed into the room, beaming, with a happy face and a clear gaze'. Full of
enthusiasm, he wanted to send war telegrams to all corners of the globe. 'It was clear to
everyone that he was completely happy'.
Pieper draws a parallel here with Adolf Hitler, fifteen years his junior, who, in his own words, was
‘overwhelmed by a stormy enthusiasm’ in 1914. A year later, during a dinner party at
Chartwell, his country estate in Kent, Churchill even used the term ‘glorious, delicious war’.
The First World War had only just ended when, as Minister of Defense, he initiated a
war against the Bolsheviks, who had brought about regime change in imperialist Russia in 1917
— with Germany as the main cause of the First World War.
Churchill wanted to strangle these ‘deadly poisonous snakes’ in the cradle, but after years of bitter civil war (1918-1920), the foreign intervention failed.
During World War II, when Hitler's defeat was already looming, Churchill, in a
conversation with Stalin, recalled ‘his’ British intervention with a surprising quip. He,
Churchill, actually deserved the highest order of the Red Army because he had learned that army to fight for his life at the time...
Earlier, at the end of the nineteenth century, as a second lieutenant and ‘embedded’
war correspondent on other continents, he had proven himself to be a true ‘warrior’.
Rebels who dared to attack the British rulers, such as in Sudan and Afghanistan,
were killed by the thousands without mercy using superior weapons. The Boers in South Africa—
who dared to defy the British Empire at the turn of the century—had to be dealt with
mercilessly if necessary. Churchill identified with the British Empire from an early age, and
that would remain the case. He was firmly convinced that the British race was superior and, on this basis had the right to world domination...
War Cabinet
In the 1930s, Churchill regularly warned in speech and writing about Hitler's Germany and
emphasized the need to bring defense capabilities up to standard. As mentioned, this put him
at odds with the government policy of his own Conservative Party, which was pursuing a policy of appeasement. Pieper casually points out that Churchill himself, as Minister of Finance in the 1920s, had significantly reduced defense spending.
With the occupation of the Low Countries in May 1940 and the invasion of France, which capitulated the following month, the deadly German threat off the coast of the United Kingdom could no longer be ignored, and pressure mounted to take drastic measures. Churchill—who had
become First Lord of the Admiralty again in 1939—took over the post of Prime Minister from the conciliatory Neville Chamberlain on May 10 at the request of King George VI. He then took the
lead in the War Cabinet he had formed. In addition to members of the Labour Party
(Clement Attlee, Arthur Greenwood), the appeasers from the Conservative Party also had seats. Apart from Chamberlain, that was Edward Halifax. Finally, the way seemed clear for Churchill's hard line of not giving an inch to the imperialism of Nazi Germany.
Curious step
Nevertheless, under pressure from the appeasers within the War Cabinet, the brand-new leader made a remarkable concession in the last week of May 1940.
He agreed, albeit with great reluctance, to Halifax's proposal to cautiously explore whether Mussolini—who at that point was still adhering to Italy's non-belligerent position—was willing to mediate a general peace settlement in Europe, i.e., including Hitler's Germany. The independence
of the British Empire had to be guaranteed in this imaginary constellation, although
Churchill added something else... ‘even if this were to be at the expense of some territory’.
By this he meant the British presence in Gibraltar, Malta, and Suez, among other places, which
Mussolini considered highly undesirable—in his view, the Mediterranean belonged
to Italy (mare nostrum). The condition, of course, was that Mussolini would not go to war against France and the United Kingdom. It was, in other words, an attempt to ‘buy off’ Mussolini.
Consideration was also given to returning former German colonies – which the country had
lost under the Treaty of Versailles (1919) and which had been divided among the
victors – to Germany. Churchill remained skeptical but also ambivalent. In that
last crucial week of May 1940, he believed that if Herr Hitler was willing to make peace on
the condition that Germany would regain its colonies and once again rule Central Europe, then it was worth discussing. But according to Churchill, it was extremely unlikely that Hitler would make such an offer.
Churchill's British feeler had to remain strictly secret, of course, because otherwise it would have a negative effect on public opinion and cause confusion about Churchill's reputation
as a fearless opponent of the policy of reconciliation with Hitler. But the
‘peace deal’ proved unviable. Churchill was proven right—but still.
The author points out that in his detailed, massively sold, and highly influential memoirs,
The Second World War, which were published in several volumes between 1948 and 1954,
this affair is nowhere to be found.
The fact that the situation in London had reached a critical point was also evident from the fact that in early July, Churchill gave permission to the British ambassador in Moscow, Stafford Cripps, to cautiously seek rapprochement with Stalin. In vain. The Russian dictator wished to stick to the
devil's pact with his ‘friend’ Hitler from 1939.
At the same time, Churchill continued to urge US President Roosevelt to intervene militarily. But the beleaguered kingdom would have to wait a while longer. Only after the Soviet Union and the United States entered the war in June and December 1941, respectively,
could Churchill breathe a sigh of relief. The United Kingdom was already receiving large quantities of American military equipment.
A major achievement
The dreaded German attack on the United Kingdom was not long in coming. The British
civilian population was ravaged by the brutal German air terror of Commander-in-Chief
Hermann Göring. Earlier, civilians in Warsaw and Rotterdam had already been horrifically
introduced to the Luftwaffe. But after a fierce battle, German fighter planes and bombers failed
to take out the Royal Air Force and demoralize the population.
Operation Sea Lion, the planned German invasion of the British mainland, never materialized.
Throughout the war, Churchill also managed to inspire the population outside the United Kingdom with determined speeches to persevere and believe in final victory. Churchill played a crucial role, particularly during the early stages when the island stood alone.
In scathing terms, he tore to shreds the aggressive and
pernicious policies of Hitler and - now also - Mussolini, who shortly after the successful German invasion of France in June 1940, dared to invade the country from the south-west.
The despicable dictators of Germany and Italy had set their sights on Western
civilization and freedom, and Churchill refused to accept this. Pieper expresses his
deepest gratitude that, thanks in part to Churchill, aggressive Germany was (ultimately)
crushed. That was and remains a major achievement.
However, Churchill's concept of ‘freedom’ had limited meaning for him, Pieper concludes, because it did not apply to the British colony of India, for example. While some members of parliament cautiously outlined a roadmap towards the British Commonwealth, 'the Greatest Briton of all time' systematically refused to even consider India's independence. When
1943-1944, a famine broke out in Bengal, causing more than 1.5 million deaths,
he remained indifferent. In Boris Johnson's otherwise readable biography, The Churchill
Factor (2015), one searches in vain for any mention of this catastrophe.
In addition to India, Pieper could also have mentioned the dramatic events in the British colony of Kenya. During Churchill's post-war premiership (1951-1955), an uprising broke out among the
Mau Mau: tens of thousands were killed or wounded. Hundreds of thousands of Kenyans
underwent a ‘transfer’.
Judgmental ability
How can we explain that Churchill, with his much-praised pleas in the 1930s for
increasing British armament, found so little support for so long?
This was due in large part to the humiliating military fiasco during the battle on the Gallipoli peninsula Gallipoli in 1915 on the Turkish coast (that country fought on the side of Germany), which was still fresh in the minds of his political opponents. In this failed attempt to advance on
Constantinople, more than 200,000 Allied troops - from the United
Kingdom, Australia, France, New Zealand, and India—were “put out of action” by the Turks.
As the responsible commander-in-chief of the Admiralty, he was promptly dismissed.
Churchill, too, would remember this extremely painful debacle for the rest of his life. When, long after World War II, once again took a cruise on Aristotle Onassis' luxury yacht, which
also passed along the Turkish coast, it was planned during the night hours for his sake, just to be sure.
There was therefore considerable doubt about his judgment. Furthermore, Churchill’s
recalcitrant behavior regarding India's independence was held against him. And also:
was Churchill not too eager when it came to waging war?
In addition, many conservatives believed that the real danger lay not in Berlin, but
in Moscow. This was not such a foolish idea, because Stalin's domestic regime was clearly more murderous than Hitler's well into the 1930s.
However, in terms of foreign policy, revanchist, aggressively expanding Germany was at that
time the central European problem for both London and Moscow. And throughout the 1930s, both states were engaged in compromises designed to keep that poisonous German potato at bay
and, if possible, roll it in the opposite direction.
Rather ambivalent
Churchill's attitude toward Hitler's Germany contrasted favorably with that of most other conservative Members of Parliament, and he ultimately emerged as the most suitable candidate. However, that did not mean that his attitude was consistent, as legend would have it. In addition to sharp criticism, he was also capable of admiration for Germany and the Führer well into the interwar period.
It is to Pieper's credit that he also examined this relatively unknown issue. In his 1937 book Great Contemporaries, he wished to give Hitler the benefit of the doubt: (...)
'We cannot say whether Hitler will be the man who will one day unleash a new war on the world,
in which civilization will be irretrievably destroyed, or whether he will be remembered in
history as the man who restored honor and peace in the spirit of the great
German people. and, calm, helpful, and strong, brought them back to the forefront of the
European family circle'. And also: 'Those who have met Herr Hitler personally in an official
capacity or in a more private context have encountered an extremely competent, cool-headed, well-informed official with a pleasant manner and a disarming smile, and few have failed to be
impressed by his strong personal influence'.
Pieper also looked at the Evening Standard from the same year, 1937. Churchill: 'You don't have to like Hitler's system to admire his patriotic achievements." Should the
UK ever be subjugated as Germany was in 1918, Churchill wanted a man of
Hitler's stature "to give us courage again and restore us to our rightful place
among the nations." As late as February 1938, Churchill believed in his contribution “It's not over yet” in the same magazine that no one could predict the future, the course of events in Germany:
"The German army, under its iron discipline, may retain the spirit of freedom and tolerance.”
According to Pieper, there was only one man whom Churchill despised and hated to the core at that time. It was not Hitler, but Mahatma Gandhi, who was striving for independence through peaceful mass action.
What Churchill said about this rebellious colony and its leader is of the lowest order. A crudeness that, as far as the Western world is concerned, is most reminiscent of the unvarnished expressions of the current American president (“shit-hole countries,” et cetera). But, to be fair, Indian soldiers who were willing to join the Allied ranks received a pat on the head after the war.
In his war memoirs, Churchill made it seem, according to Pieper, as if he had foreseen it all
with razor-sharp clarity from the beginning. He had been the “voice crying in the wilderness,” but what he had been ‘crying’ well into the 1930s was in reality rather ambiguous. And according to Pieper, the idea that there could have been such a thing as the ‘destiny’ of ‘a chosen one’ is a legend spread by Churchill himself. According to Pieper, the power with which this legend lives on is clearly evident in the subtitle of Andrew Roberts' 2018 biography of Churchill: Walking with Destiny...
Ruthless
In order to bring hostile, aggressive Germany to its knees during the First World War,
Churchill stopped at nothing, not even the infamous naval blockade. His goal was, in his
own words, 'to subjugate the entire [German] population—men, women, and children, old and young, wounded and healthy—through starvation' .
But after the Reichskriegsflagge was lowered at the end of 1918, Churchill believed that Germany should be allowed to rejoin the ‘European family circle’. He proposed sending a series of ships carrying food to starving Germany. Not primarily out of forgiveness or
mercy, according to Pieper. But in line with a tried and tested British principle, it was to restore the disturbed balance of power after the war: although an overly powerful Germany had been prevented, an overly weak Germany was also dangerous. Churchill could also be pragmatic.
During the Second World War, Churchill's ruthlessness reached new heights. The
British and, from 1942, also the American air forces carried out day and night
bombing raids on Germany, often deliberately targeting civilian
objectives in addition to military ones.
Stalin—who suggested that the British were deliberately delaying the promised “second front” in the west—was somewhat reassured by Churchill: “We will show no mercy.”
(...) “If necessary, we will destroy almost every house in every German city”. According to the
protocol seen by Pieper, Stalin smiled and replied: ‘That wouldn't be bad’. To his
satisfaction, he received photo albums from the Allies showing images of cities shot to rubble,
the so-called dehousing. The number of civilian casualties ran into the
hundreds of thousands.
After the war, Churchill justified his actions by arguing that Germany had started
with “the repulsive method of aerial bombardment of open cities.” As if
that justified all disproportionate means. To a certain extent, it is
reminiscent of the policy of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—an admirer of Churchill—
with his relentless bombing of the “liberation organization” Hamas, of children, of
babies, and the deliberate and collective starvation of Palestinians in response to the
massacre of Israeli civilians by Hamas on October 7, 2023.
That the morale of the German population would be broken and the war shortened as a result remains highly doubtful, says Pieper. After all, that did not happen in the United Kingdom.
Bomb terror
On November 30, 1964, Churchill celebrated his 90th birthday. But barely two months after
the festivities, on January 24, 1965, he died and the United Kingdom was plunged into mourning.
In Germany, the mood was much less unanimous. Admittedly, the then Federal President Heinrich Lübke stated in his congratulatory telegram on the occasion of Churchill's birthday:
'On your birthday, the entire [!] German people remember you with sincere admiration'. But a
visit by Pieper to the Federal Archives in Koblenz provides an insight into the letters preserved there, which paint a different picture.
A younger letter writer from Hanover responded by saying that the British
bombings had caused "hundreds of thousands of German children, women, and elderly people to
die in terrible agony or be maimed for the rest of their sad lives"
(...) 'Do you mean that the war crimes of the British Prime Minister can be justified by
the barbaric acts of the German war leaders?'
At Churchill's funeral, which was watched by some 300 million people worldwide,
the government in the then capital Bonn decided to fly flags at half-mast
on government buildings. Again, there were civil protests. A survivor from the heavily
affected Pforzheim (between Karlsruhe and Stuttgart) wrote: 'This man was recently the initiator
of the bombing of Germany. I myself lost five family members'. The honor bestowed on Churchill with these Halbmastbeflaggung was nothing but disrespect for our
dead. Pieper also refers to the vice-chairman of the CDU from Bremen. He was
approached from various sides about the incomprehensible fact 'that the very man who, as the
initiator of the unlimited bombing terror against the civilian population, brought unspeakable suffering upon our people... is to be honored in Germany'.
Churchill not only loved waging war, he was also very quick to initiate
total destruction operations - civilian targets were no afterthought.
In 1945-1946, several trials organized by the Allied victors took place in Nuremberg against Nazi leaders. It is telling that the Nazi leadership was tried for many crimes, but not for the German aerial terror against the civilian populations of Warsaw, Rotterdam, London, and other cities. Hermann Goering, commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, was not questioned about this. On the “advice” of the British Foreign Office, Pieper writes, the terror bombings of civilians were removed from the list of charges. President Truman, who succeeded Roosevelt in 1945, gave
chief prosecutor Robert Jackson similar instructions. In other words: we must
be careful or we will end up in the dock ourselves.
The author considers it highly unlikely that the Allied bombings shortened the war. After all, the British population had not succumbed, quite the contrary.
With regard to the British terror bombings of Nazi Germany, Pieper concludes that 'after the
war, it would not have been difficult for impartial prosecutors, if they had wanted to prosecute the
bombings, to also put Churchill in the dock as a war criminal. There would have been sufficient evidence and legal grounds for a trial’.
Whether many Britons would be inclined to endorse this statement is highly questionable.
Dietmar Pieper has identified various legends surrounding Winston Churchill, critically examined them, and skillfully neutralized them. Unlike British Churchill biographers such as Boris Johnson and Andrew Roberts, this biography does not suffer from over-identification.
Pieper proved capable of working with more distance, which yielded a result that was as refreshing as it was surprising. This created something that British diplomacy has always been so fond of: balance of power. Admittedly, not at the inter-state level on the European continent, but in the field of Churchill historiography in the United Kingdom.
