Swastika over Wales?

On a clear autumn day, the swastika is unfurled over Cardiff City Hall.

It looks like a still from a movie

imagining a Nazi invasion of Britain, but this really happened.

In October 1938, the swastika flew over Cardiff.

It's a startling reminder of the respect, even admiration,

that some felt towards Hitler.

This is the story of the extraordinary links

between Wales and the Nazi regime, a tale of intrigue and espionage.

It reveals how the Third Reich sought to exploit

an ambivalence that stretched across Welsh politics,

from radical firebrands to elder statesmen but, ultimately,

the Germans' belief that they could recruit the Welsh to their cause

would prove fatally damaging, not to Wales, but to the Nazis themselves.

This programme contains some scenes which some viewers may find upsetting

During the 1930s, Europe found itself in political

and economic turmoil following the 1929 Wall Street crash.

In Germany, which was particularly badly hit,

National Socialism appeared to offer a solution to the failures

of capitalism through totalitarian state control.

What Fascism does is

it unites that desire for order with a sense of patriotism,

patriotic purpose, imperial destiny.

What Hitler and the Nazis promised, of course, was a way forward.

In 1933, one Welshman got a rare glimpse into the heart

of the political revolution that was sweeping Germany.

Born in Barry and educated at Aberystwyth, Gareth Jones was

a journalist, an accomplished linguist

and aide to former premier David Lloyd George.

In February 1933, Jones travelled to Germany on a fact-finding

mission to investigate Nazism.

He arrived in Leipzig as Hitler became Chancellor.

His notebook gives a first-hand account of the trip.

"A car drives through the snow. Out steps a very ordinary-looking man.

"It is a mystery to me how he has his appeal.

"Looks like a middle-class grocer."

Jones joined Hitler and his entourage in a flight to Frankfurt.

"If aeroplane should crash, whole history of Germany would change.

"Hitler is a few feet away, Goebbels behind him."

Jones spoke at length with Joseph Goebbels,

Hitler's Minister of Propaganda, describing him as...

"A little man with remarkably lively eyes, very dark

"with great sense of humour. Narrow head, like a South Wales collier."

In Goebbels' diary, he doesn't use his name, Gareth Jones,

but he refers to him as Lloyd George's secretary.

Clearly, he felt that by talking to Gareth,

he was maybe opening up a conduit, or a way of impressing

an influential political figure in Britain.

In Frankfurt, Hitler addressed 25,000 supporters

at an election rally.

"Masses of young people waving little flags,

"then Hitler outstretched his hands.

"Pandemonium."

They harnessed modern propaganda.

They used music, movement, drama, spectacle

to create a magical, entrancing experience

for people who were actually present at those rallies.

"Imagine the enthusiasm of an Eisteddfod,

"add national passion,

"14 years' defeat, humiliation,

"wants of middle classes, inflation, war guilt."

They were looking for a saviour

who would eliminate

or rub out the stain and humiliation of defeat in the First World War

and, at the same time, give them a Germany that was worth living in.

And certainly, by the mid-'30s, Hitler had started to do that.

In articles he wrote for the Western Mail,

Jones reported favourably on the German government's efforts

to address unemployment, but he was outspoken in his criticism

of the Nazi Party's anti-Semitism.

Gareth picked up on this, and at a point when many people,

both in Germany and outside Germany,

were trying to downplay this,

he saw, clearly, that it was at the heart of Nazi ideology.

"Hitler accuses the Jews of Machiavellian intentions

"upon the life of the world.

"The most brutal and also the pettiest methods

"are adopted to drum hatred of the Jews into the German people."

It's noticeable it should be people in Wales

reading the Western Mail who were getting some of the most accurate

insightful, perceptive reporting of Nazi Germany

anywhere outside Germany at this point.

However, David Lloyd George,

known to millions as the man who had won the Great War,

appeared blind to the dangers that Gareth Jones perceived.

Like many politicians of the time,

Lloyd George admired aspects of the new National Socialist regime in Germany,

and the admiration was reciprocated.

Hitler himself had this tremendous admiration

for those he had fought against in the First World War.

He had this sense of - very genuine sense of - comradeship.

In 1936, Lloyd George was invited to meet Hitler

in his Alpine retreat at Berchtesgaden.

-OLD NEWSREEL:

-'Once they hated him,

'now Lloyd George is a welcome guest in Germany.'

David Lloyd George was really an old man by that period.

He was a disappointed old man,

he's a man who felt he'd been spurned by the British people,

and he was looking for people

who would admire him.

And, of course, in Germany

they played to that.

'How well he looks!

'The man whom the Germans regarded

'as the greatest force against them of the war.'

'Now he is their friend.'

Lloyd George shared Hitler's passion

to bring the economic depression in Western Europe to an end.

He thought that Hitler

could explain things to us

in a way which we could possibly benefit from.

I suspect that he saw in David Lloyd George an opportunity

to say, "Look, even those who put us in this situation

"have actually now become our admirers."

Lloyd George wrote of Hitler,

"He is a born leader of men.

"The George Washington of Germany."

I think looking back we would see this as a mistake

on the part of Lloyd George.

An unfortunate propaganda coup for Hitler,

but, of course, Lloyd George was not alone

in making visits to Hitler

or saying things which in retrospect look rather foolish.

Hitler's admirers included newspaper barons like Lord Rothermere

and even the future king Edward VIII.

But the leader of Britain's home-grown fascist movement

was Oswald Mosley,

a one-time Labour MP who had briefly been close to Aneurin Bevan.

Mosley had split with the party

and created the British Union of Fascists.

'In the lives of great nations

'comes a moment of decision, comes a moment of destiny.'

The BUF tried to attract support in South Wales, searching for

an image of poverty stricken Britain

for a propaganda film they came

to Merthyr Tydfil.

Merthyr Tydfil, of course, was one of those towns

in south Wales that was suffering horrendously

from the economic depression.

So it was not unsurprising that a place like Merthyr might have

been seen as a happy hunting ground for the British Union of Fascists.

One of those in South Wales who responded

to the appeal of the BUF was Jeffrey Hamm of Pontypool.

He joined the party in 1935,

and after the war became Oswald Mosley's private secretary,

and main cheerleader in Britain.

And if you had had good strong government...

Jeffrey Hamm explained his motivation for joining the BUF

as being a conviction that something needed to be done to tackle

the widespread unemployment that he could see

about him, and that had actually affected him personally.

We've got the same problems now as we had in the '30s...

In Wales, Jeffrey Hamm was the exception.

The socialist stronghold of the South Wales coalfields

greeted fascism with hostility.

In 1936, there was an attempt to halt a fascist rally at the

Winton Field in Tonypandy,

and there's a big antifascist demonstration.

So it becomes extremely difficult for the British Union of Fascists

to stage anything really in the South Wales valleys.

The strength of the trade union movement

prevented the British Union of Fascists

from gaining any real foothold in South Wales.

But while fascism remained a minority concern here,

elsewhere in Europe, the far right was on the march.

In 1938, Western leaders appeased Hitler's military expansion,

by signing the Munich Agreement

which handed Germany a section of Czechoslovakia

in return for the promise of peace.

The Munich Agreement was greeted all over the country with huge relief.

Enormous relief.

It was a very ephemeral emotion,

but it was a genuine emotion.

To mark the occasion, the Conservative Lord Mayor of Cardiff,

Oliver Cuthbert Purnell, ordered the flags of the four countries

who had signed the agreement to be flown over the city -

and so, the swastika was raised.

Within about, I think just over 24 hours,

two Labour councillors went up and pulled it down again.

Nonetheless, it was restored a day or two later.

The mayor said of those who'd removed the flag,

"I despise people who add to the risks of possible war.

"There is such a thing as being a traitor to peace."

The 1930s is only a few years after the end of the worst cataclysm

in military history.

People were petrified of the idea of another war.

How could you have been brought up in that generation,

and looked on a new war with any kind of equanimity.

With any kind of confidence.

With any kind of patriotism even.

So it became almost, but not quite, peace at any price.

And, of course, Hitler exploited that.

Many were appalled by the establishment appeasement of Hitler.

Goronwy Rees, a brilliant Oxford scholar from Aberystwyth,

had witnessed the rise of the Nazi state as a young man in Berlin in 1934.

Rees was an immense enthusiast for Germany as a civilisation.

Germany as culture.

He was genuinely shocked and appalled at what

he saw as the barbarisation of a great European civilisation.

He was very alarmed by what National Socialism would imply

for the future of Germany,

and of Europe, in general.

Back in Britain, where he became assistant editor of the Spectator,

Rees felt the Western powers' policy of appeasement

left only one credible alternative to Nazism.

He thought that, in essence, the only hope for civilisation

against the new barbarism embodied by Nazi Germany

was that the Soviet Union be bolstered.

Rees's friend, Guy Burgess,

who would later be unmasked as a KGB agent,

persuaded him to support the Soviet struggle against Hitler

by spying for them.

The Soviet Union was keen to know what influential establishment figures

thought of the likelihood of Britain going to war.

He was a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford

which included some very notable people

amongst their fellows and graduates,

including Geoffrey Dawson the editor of The Times,

and Sir John Simon, the Home Secretary.

And what Rees essentially did was to pass on tittle-tattle

from All Souls College to the Soviets.

Goronwy Rees was right about the folly of appeasement,

within six months Hitler tore up the Munich Agreement

and occupied Czechoslovakia.

As the world stood on the brink of another global conflict,

many were stunned when the Soviet Union supported Hitler

by signing a non-aggression treaty with Germany.

The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact

shocked an awful lot of people who believed that Russia

was the bastion of integrity against fascism.

The idea that they would have an agreement was beyond comprehension,

and so an awful lot of people

actually left the Communist Party at that point.

For Goronwy Rees, who'd been spying for the Soviets

in the cause of anti-fascism,

the Nazi-Soviet pact was a hammer blow.

At that juncture he decided he was not going to pass on

any more information to the Soviet Union

and, if you will, the scales fell from his eyes.

When war was declared,

many in the British Communist Party -

who had been instructed by Moscow to oppose the conflict -

also faced a dilemma.

They were torn between their anti-fascist principles,

and party loyalty.

The president of the South Wales Miners' Federation

is a man called Arthur Horner,

a card-carrying member of the Communist Party.

Horner recognises the dilemma that he faces.

He does not want to lead the South Wales miners into a position

whereby they see the war as an imperialist war

that is none of their business,

because he recognises the threat of fascism.

So he carefully manages a particular conference

to enable the South Wales miners to, essentially, back the war effort.

If the war presented a dilemma for those on the far left,

it was equally problematic for the Welsh nationalist movement.

To support the war, would necessarily mean supporting Britain.

To oppose the war outright would lead to consequences for the party

under wartime restrictions, of course.

In 1938, Plaid Cymru declared its position on the war

would be one of neutrality.

Plaid's official position on the Second World War,

which is that Wales should be neutral,

is very problematic, and looks politically naive.

It might've been consistent with their interpretation of Welsh history

and the course of English imperialism,

but, of course, Hitler's Germany

is a very, very different beast indeed

from British Empire.

But for one man, there was little difference between Nazism

and the British Empire of old.

Saunders Lewis led Plaid Cymru for 13 years

and remained a dominant figure

after he stood down as party president in 1939.

Lewis expounded his views on international affairs

in a column called Cwrs y Byd, The Course of the World,

in the Welsh weekly newspaper Y Faner.

"Is there any difference between the German policy and the new order

"on one hand and the English policy and the old order on the other?

"They are the same in all their essentials.

"They are two economic empires competing for supremacy."

He was convinced, I think, that, whichever side won,

Wales would be the loser.

If the Allies won,

that would strengthen the British imperial project.

It would prove that Britain, if you like, was top dog.

Er, if the Axis powers won, then you were into, er...

heaven alone knows what.

It's Wales losing its identity in either eventuality.

When the government introduced new powers in 1940 to imprison

British fascists and other perceived undesirables,

Lewis called Winston Churchill,

"Britain's first dictator since Oliver Cromwell".

This outspoken attitude drew criticism from many quarters.

The Western Mail, at that time, regarded Plaid as traitors.

There was some pretty vitriolic editorials about,

um, Saunders Lewis and about Plaid Cymru's attitude towards the war.

Plaid Cymru's neutrality helped fuel a perception in the '30s

and early '40s that it was strengthening the cause

of fascist dictators and even that it was itself a fascist party.

A lot of the reason why historians have tried to find

a fascist element in Plaid Cymru centres on the character,

the personality of Saunders Lewis.

Lewis was an ultraconservative traditionalist

who opposed centralised state control

and the leader cult that was being embraced in some European countries.

He explicitly rejected the new creed of fascism,

declaring that Plaid Cymru would fight to defend Wales

against fascist dictatorship, but he also wrote that Plaid

had gone "to the same source as the leaders of fascism

"for living water to refresh the desert of our social life".

What he meant by the wellsprings,

the shared ground with the fascist project, were ideas of,

if you like, blood and soil.

The, er, loyalty to the past, that you have...you're indebted

to your inheritance, but it was never a personality cult.

Plaid Cymru was in no sense a fascist party,

but Lewis's attitude towards Hitler was ambivalent,

particularly regarding his treatment of the Jews.

In 1933, while acknowledging that some Jews,

whom he considered innocent, were being persecuted,

Lewis had appeared to endorse Hitler's eradication

of the financial strength of the Jews

in Germany's economic life and had suggested

that the British press was being paid to peddle Jewish propaganda.

As the economy declined dramatically, so people were looking for scapegoats

and the people who seemed to be riding above this were merchants,

bankers, very often Jewish, and they became the scapegoats.

SHOUTING AND JEERING

Lewis had warned previously of what he called

"dangerous and sinister Napoleonic Jews,

"intent on conquering politics and the global economy."

Now, with the world at war, he published his apocalyptic poem -

Y Dilyw 1939 - or The Deluge 1939,

in which he laid the blame for economic depression

and conflict at the door of international finance.

He speaks of the bankers on Wall Street with their "Hebrew snouts"

or their Hebrew nostrils, "ffroenau Hebreig",

er, "in the quarter's statistics"

and they make the decision not to extend credit.

That's where the roots of the war lie,

and he chooses to emphasise their...their Jewishness.

The range of controversial views Lewis expressed

in his wartime journalism for papers like Y Faner

made him a person of interest to the British authorities.

The column was very regularly censored.

Items were cut, er, and...

..Saunders Lewis, the columnist, was being watched.

The column was seen as potentially explosive.

I don't think that they thought the Welsh Nationalist Party

was in any way capable of undermining the state,

but it could have a psychological effect on morale during wartime.

Declassified intelligence documents, held at the National Archives,

reveal what the authorities made of alleged subversives

in the nationalist camp. In 1940, the Home Office drew up

a list of suspects to be arrested in the event of an invasion.

It included 156 Welsh residents, mostly Italian immigrants,

suspected of siding with Hitler's ally Mussolini.

But also singled out were six Plaid Cymru members,

including Saunders Lewis and his successor as Plaid president,

JE Daniel, who was denounced by officials at Bangor University.

His intelligence file reads...

"The ex-registrar of the University, who has known Daniel

"for a great many years, described him as being very dangerous.

"If the Germans landed in the Bangor district,

"he would himself shoot Daniel."

And the file on Saunders Lewis reported that...

"When asked at an open meeting, on May 18th, 1940,

"whether he would take up arms if the Germans invaded Wales, Lewis replied,

"'I will answer that question when the Germans are in this country.'

"I consider that this individual is dangerous

"and should be arrested in the event of an invasion."

But much of the testimony against Lewis, and the other five

Plaid Cymru members, was gossip and hearsay from anonymous informants.

I mean, the whole idea of there being Plaid spies,

er, for Germany during the war

is just a nonsense. It's all smoke and mirrors.

There was absolutely nothing there of any substance whatsoever.

There's no evidence that MI5 considered

the Welsh nationalist movement as a whole a threat,

but they realised that the illusion of Welsh collaboration

could prove a weapon in the espionage war.

MI5 knew the Nazis believed they could exploit Celtic nationalism.

Breton separatists had collaborated with the SS in occupied France

and, in Ireland, President Eamon de Valera

had declared the Republic neutral,

but more militant Irish nationalists went further.

The Irish Republican Army

had completely thrown in its lot with the Nazis and had sent

an important liaison officer to Berlin.

Encouraged by this, German military intelligence

tried to recruit sympathetic Welsh agents to their cause.

This set the stage for a grand deception involving two Welshmen

that would have a decisive impact on the outcome of the war.

The first of these was Arthur Owens, a Pontardawe-born engineer

whose work gave him access to naval shipyards across Europe.

He successfully persuaded everybody that he spoke to that

he strongly disliked the English and that "my enemy's enemy is my friend",

er, he'd be perfectly willing to collaborate with the Germans.

Owens was recruited by German military intelligence

to provide intelligence on the capabilities of British forces.

But Owens became a double agent,

working for MI5 under the codename SNOW.

When the Germans asked Owens

to provide identification documents for new spies arriving in Britain,

British intelligence seized a remarkable opportunity.

Arthur Owens, in collaboration with MI5, was able to provide them

with very dodgy information, which meant that every single German spy

that was subsequently parachuted into England

carried an identification card that had already been compromised.

This enabled MI5 to intercept these Nazi spies and recruit them

as double agents in an audacious operation called XX.

By the end of the Second World War,

the XX system involved over 80 double agents and, ultimately,

when it came to major deception campaigns,

such as persuading the Germans that the D-Day landings were going

to take place in Calais, and not in Normandy, the double agents

were responsible for saving tens of thousands of lives.

As well as infiltrating agents into Britain,

the Nazis had special plans for Wales,

as Owens revealed to British intelligence after a meeting

with his German handler, who was known as Dr Rantzau.

Owens' MI5 case officer wrote...

"Rantzau is anxious to get hold of a Welshman

"who is a member of the Welsh Nationalist Party.

"Apparently, Rantzau wishes to use this organisation

"to create disturbances in Wales.

"Once he has established this link, he proposes to supply them

"with arms which will be brought up the Bristol Channel in a submarine."

It was considered possible that a U-boot would be able to surface,

just as they did on a fairly frequent basis

in the Republic of Ireland, to come to Wales, lonely beach,

off-load explosives, a group of very committed,

politically active saboteurs would then distribute the explosives

and undermine the British war effort.

MI5 decided that, if the enemy wanted

a treacherous Welsh nationalist, they'd give them one.

They sent Gwilym Williams,

a retired Swansea police officer, to accompany SNOW

on his next rendezvous with the Germans in Belgium.

When Gwilym Williams was interviewed in Antwerp over

the course of three days, he was told quite clearly

that, in the event of Hitler winning the war,

Wales would get independence.

MI5 had instructed Williams to tell the Germans

he had a small army of Welshmen waiting, ready to collaborate.

According to his Secret Service case notes...

"GW stated that he had about 30 men in South Wales

"upon whom he could rely.

"They discussed arrangements for the moving of some of these Welshmen

"into factories in England for sabotage purposes.

"They also wanted some advice on the landing of explosives in Wales

"and it was decided that Oxwich Bay was the best spot.

"They also suggested that they should drop pamphlets in Welsh

"for propaganda purposes."

They had all sorts of schemes for blowing up dams,

for poisoning the water supply. These were very ambitious plans

which, ultimately, MI5 was able to exercise complete control over.

Gwilym Williams' fake accounts of Welsh national sentiment

hoodwinked German intelligence

into overestimating their chances of success.

They developed a very false image of the Welsh people -

lonely countryside, safe houses in the middle of nowhere,

a safe haven for other agents to be able to flee

in the event that they were escaping the authorities.

Um, they believed that there was a reliable large network,

just simply waiting to go into action.

This is probably the reason why people have since thought there was

a Nazi infiltration in Wales, right, but these people were fictitious.

This shadow world of Welsh Nazis,

conjured up by British intelligence, helped the Allies win the war.

But throughout the '30s and early '40s, ambivalence towards Nazism

among key figures in Wales had been all too real.

To understand that ambivalence,

it's perhaps best to view events through the prism of the times.

In the wake of the slaughter of the First World War,

Europe was desperate to avoid another catastrophe.

It's extremely difficult to understand the context

in which politicians at the beginning of the 1930s

might have held more favourable or optimistic views of Germany,

and it also renders very problematic understanding the mindset

of the appeasing politicians, who, you know, had the avoidance of war,

the avoidance of conflict, really as their guiding principle.

And in a world where faith in old certainties had been shattered

by the Great War and economic depression,

it's perhaps not surprising

that many were grasping for radical new solutions.

Some people went along a journey which took them to the right.

Others to the extreme left.

And it took some years before it settled down.

I think that tells you an awful lot about the...

uncertainties of politics in the 1930s.

We have learned an awful lot from that period

and I think our politics has changed accordingly.