Goering loved children and animals

The glamour of strong leaders has misled us badly in the past, says james bartholomew

ow easy is it to recognise evil? In a second-hand book sale recently, I came across Failure of a Mission, published in 1940 and written by Sir Nevile Henderson, the last British ambassador to Germany before the second world war. His assessments of Nazi Germany, read with the benefit of hindsight, are shocking.

Of Hermann Goering (right), head of the Luftwaffe, he wrote: "I must frankly say that I had a real personal liking for him". Goering had "a Falstaffian sense of humour" and he "loved children and animals".

Goering once took Sir Nevile on a hunting trip. He was an "hospitable host and sportsman" with whom our ambassador "spent many hours in friendly and honourable dispute and argument".

Rudolph Hess was not without qualities either. With his "famous smile" he was "perhaps the most attractive looking

The Nuremberg rally had ‘a grandiose beauty,’ wrote the British ambassador

of the leading Nazis". As for Baron von Neurath, the foreign minister, he and his wife, "had been extremely popular in England and I liked them both immensely".

The Nazi Nuremberg rally in 1937 - now seen as the incarnation of vileness - had "a grandiose beauty"; Sir Nevile "had never seen a ballet to compare with it".

Sir Nevile did make some criticisms and he condemned the Nazis for starting the war, but there is no sense at all that he understood how terrible they were.

Most of us like to think that, had we been around in the 1930s, we would have been little Churchills in understanding the fanaticism and opposing it relentlessly. But many people at the time did not. Evil does not go around with a sign around its neck.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the new Iranian president, has a smile at least as charming as Hess's. But he wants to wipe Israel off the map and is developing nuclear weapons. Evil can be charming, hospitable and even have "a grandiose beauty". It is a lesson worth learning.

FIRST POSTED JANUARY 23

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