'Ambulant Amateurs': the Rise and Fade of the Anglo-German Fellowship
‘Ambulant amateurs’: the rise and fade of the Anglo-German Fellowship Charles Spicer Institute of Historical Research School of Advanced Study University of London Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2018 1 I hereby declare that the work presented in this thesis is entirely my own. ………………………………………….. Date …………….. 2 Abstract This thesis chronicles the fortunes of the Anglo-German Fellowship, the British society founded in 1935 that advocated friendship with Hitler’s Germany up to its suspension in October 1939 following the outbreak of war. Drawing on newly discovered and previously overlooked primary sources, thematic and chronological methods are combined to explore how the Fellowship’s leaders played a bigger role in the diplomatic crises of the late 1930s than previously acknowledged. Supported by its sister organisation in Germany, the Fellowship attracted support from British royal, political, diplomatic, aristocratic, business, financial, military, sporting and intelligence elites with its membership reaching nine hundred by 1938. Funded by business and financial interests and patronised by Anglo-German royalty, it was influenced by the German high command, welcomed by elements of the British establishment and infiltrated by British, German, Russian and Jewish intelligence agents. To the extent it has been covered in the secondary literature, those assessing the Fellowship have classed it alongside the nasty, the eccentric and the irrelevant within ‘the Fellow Travellers of the Right’ tradition. This thesis challenges those stereotypes, arguing that it has been consequently misinterpreted and underestimated both by scholars and in popular culture over the last eighty years. Using primary sources to build an objective prosopography of its membership, evidence is offered that the Fellowship was more than a fringe pressure group and dining club and achieved international credibility as a lobbying body, diplomatic intermediary and intelligence- gathering tool.
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