Sir Nevile Meyrick Henderson (10 June 1882 – 30 December 1942) was a British diplomat who served as the ambassador of the United Kingdom to Germany from 1937 to 1939.
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Early life and education
Henderson was born at Sedgwick Park, near Horsham, Sussex, the third child of Robert Henderson and Emma Caroline Hargreaves. His uncle was Reginald Hargreaves, who married Alice Liddell, the original of Alice in Wonderland. Henderson was very attached to the countryside of Sussex, especially his home of Sedgwick, and wrote in 1940: "Each time that I returned to England the white cliffs of Dover meant Sedgwick for me, and when my mother died in 1931 and my home was sold by my elder brother's wife, something went out of my life which nothing can replace". Henderson was extremely close to his mother, Emma, a strong-willed woman who had successfully managed the estate at Sedgwick after her husband's death in 1895 and developed the gardens of Sedgwick so well that they were photographed by Country Life magazine in 1901. Henderson called his mother "the presiding genius of Sedgwick" who was a "wonderful and masterful woman if ever there was one".
He was educated at Eton and joined the Diplomatic Service in 1905. He was, as one historian notes, "something of a snob", although another historian states that his snobbishness mostly derived from the death of his mother.
Henderson had a great love of sports, guns and hunting, and those who knew him noted he was always most happy when he was out on the hunt. Henderson was also known for his love of clothing and always wore the most expensive Savile Row suits and a red carnation. He was considered to be one of the best-dressed men in the Foreign Office, being obsessed with the proper fashion even during long-distance rail voyages. Henderson's obsession with his wardrobe, social etiquette, and hunting was part of a carefully cultivated image that he sought for himself as a polished Edwardian gentleman.
Henderson never married, but his biographer, Peter Neville, wrote that "women played an important role in his life". Henderson's lifelong bachelorhood did not cause questions about his sexuality; Baron Ernst von Weizsäcker, the State Secretary of the Auswärtiges Amt, wrote in his diary that Henderson was a "ladies' man".
Ambassador to Turkey
In the early 1920s, Henderson was stationed at the embassy in Turkey, where he played an important role in the often difficult relations between Britain and the new Turkish Republic. Henderson had wanted a posting in France, rather than Turkey, where he constantly complained to his superiors about being sent. During his time in Turkey, Henderson played a major role in the negotiations about the Mosul dispute, which had been caused by Turkish President Mustafa Kemal's claim to the Mosul region of Iraq. Henderson was forceful in upholding the British claim to the region, but was prepared to yield to Turkish demands for Constantinople. He argued that Britain had been shown to have a very weak hand by the Chanak Crisis in 1922, which revealed that public opinion in Britain and its dominions was unwilling go to war over the issue.
Ambassador to France and Yugoslavia
Henderson served as an envoy to France in 1928 to 1929 and as Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia between 1929 and 1935. He did not want the latter post, whose British legation was considered to be an unglamorous post, compared to the "grand embassies" in Paris, Berlin, Rome, Moscow, Vienna, Madrid and Washington. He had been lobbying for a major post in the Paris embassy and, expecting to move back to Paris soon, continued to pay the rent for his apartment there for some time after moving to Belgrade. During his time in Belgrade, Henderson became a very close friend of King Alexander I of Yugoslavia, who shared his love of hunting and guns. In January 1929, having been a constitutional monarch, Alexander had staged a self-coup, abolished democracy and made himself the dictator of Yugoslavia. Following these events, Henderson's dispatches from Belgrade took on a notably pro-Yugoslav tone. His friendship with Alexander notably increased British influence in Yugoslavia, which first brought him attention in the Foreign Office.
As would be the case during his time in Berlin, Henderson took exception to any negative remark in the British press about Yugoslavia and wrote to the Foreign Office to ask if anything could be done to silence such criticism. After Alexander's assassination in Marseille, France, in October 1934, Henderson wrote: "I felt more emotion at King Alexander's funeral than I felt at any other except my mother's". Henderson wrote to a friend in Britain in 1935: "My sixth winter in the Belgrade trenches is the worst of all. The zest has gone out of it with King Alexander gone. It interested me enormously to play Stockmar to his Albert and that made all the difference". Henderson was also in close confidence with Prince Paul, the regent of Yugoslavia on behalf of Alexander's son, Peter II, who was only a boy. In January 1935, the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, Sir Robert "Van" Vansittart sharply rebuked him for a letter he had written to Paul in which Henderson strongly supported Yugoslavia's complaints against Italy. Vansittart complained particularly about Henderson's claim that the Italian government supported Croat and Macedonian separatist terrorists and that Italy had been involved in Alexander's assassination: "Are we convinced of this and do we wish Prince Paul to think that we are convinced of it".
Ambassador to Argentina
In 1935, Henderson became ambassador to Argentina.
Ambassador to Germany
On 28 May 1937, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden appointed Henderson to be ambassador in Berlin. Harold Macmillan wrote of Eden's choice in his 1966 memoirs:
Why he did so is difficult to understand.... Henderson proved a complete disaster; hysterical, self-opinionated and unreliable. Eden later realised what a terrible mistake he had made.
Eden wanted an ambassador in Berlin who could get along well with dictators, and Vansittart gave him a list of three diplomats who had shown a strong partiality towards autocratic leaders: Henderson, Sir Percy Loraine and Sir Miles Lampson. In his 1956 memoirs, The Mist Procession, Vansittart wrote about the appointment of Henderson: "Nevile Henderson... made such a hit with the dictator [King Alexander] by his skill at shooting that he was ultimately picked for Berlin. All know the consequences". Henderson's promotion from being the ambassador in Buenos Aires to being the ambassador in Berlin, which was regarded as one of the "grand embassies" in the Foreign Office, was a major boost to his ego. Henderson wrote at the time that he believed he had been "specially selected by Providence for the definite mission of, I trusted, helping to preserve the peace of the world". As he crossed the Atlantic on a ship to take him back to Britain, Henderson read Mein Kampf in the original German version to acquaint himself with the thinking of Adolf Hitler. Henderson wrote in his 1940 The Failure of a Mission that he was determined "to see the good side of the Nazi regime as well as the bad, and to explain as objectively as I could its aspirations and viewpoint to His Majesty's Government".
Upon arriving in London, Henderson met the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Neville Chamberlain, who was due to replace Stanley Baldwin as prime minister the next month, for a briefing about the Berlin mission. Some controversy has ensued over just what precisely Chamberlain told Henderson. In Failure of a Mission, Henderson wrote that Chamberlain "outlined to me his views on the general policy towards Germany and I think I may honestly say to the last and bitter end I followed the general line which he set me, all the more easily and faithfully since it corresponded so closely with my own private conception of the service I could best render in Germany to my own country". Henderson was to say that Chamberlain had authorised him to commit "calculated indiscretions" in the pursuit of peace, but the German-born American historian Abraham Ascher wrote that no evidence has emerged to support that claim. T. Philip Conwell-Evans, a British historian who taught German history at Königsberg University, later said Henderson had told him that Chamberlain had made him his personal envoy to Germany who was to bypass Vansittart by taking orders directly from Chamberlain's office. Regardless of what Chamberlain said to Henderson in April 1937, Henderson always seemed to have regarded himself as directly answerable to 10 Downing Street and showed a marked tendency to ignore Vansittart.
Sudeten issue
On 16 March 1938, Henderson wrote to the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, to set out his view: "British interests and the standard of morality can only be combined if we insist upon the fullest possible equality for the Sudeten minority of Czechoslovakia". Unlike Basil Newton, the British minister in Prague, Henderson initially advocated plans to turn Czechoslovakia into a federation and wrote to Halifax "how to secure, if we can, the integrity of Czechoslovakia". At a meeting with Vojtech Mastny, the Czechoslovak minister in Berlin, on 30 March 1938, Henderson admitted that Czechoslovakia had the best record for the treatment of its minorities in Eastern Europe but criticised Czechoslovakia for being a unitary state, which he argued caused too many problems in a state made up of Czechs, Slovaks, Magyars, Germans, Poles and Ukrainians. Henderson told Mastny that he felt that becoming a "Federal State" was Czechoslovakia's best hope and wanted Czechoslovakia to reorientate its foreign policy upon "Prague–Berlin–Paris axis", instead of the existing "Prague–Paris–Moscow axis". In the spring of 1938, Henderson formed an alliance with Newton to work together to persuade decisionmakers in London to side with Germany against Czechoslovakia. When Henderson sent Newton a private letter praising him for his pro-German dispatches on 19 May 1938, the latter replied with a letter saying that he hoped Henderson would "be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and when that is done, I hope I may receive honourable mention. You have much the hardest job".
During the May Crisis of 20–21 May 1938, Henderson was badly shaken by the partial Czechoslovak mobilisation, which, for Henderson, proved that President Edvard Beneš was dangerous and reckless. At the same time, Henderson formed alliances with Baron Ernst von Weizsäcker, the State Secretary of the Auswärtiges Amt; André François-Poncet, the French ambassador in Berlin; and Baron Bernardo Attolico, the Italian ambassador in Berlin, to work together to "manage" Germany's return to great power status peacefully. Acting independently of their own national governments, Weizsäcker, Attolico, Henderson and François-Poncet formed a common front: on the one hand, to sabotage the plans of Hitler and Ribbentrop to attack Czechoslovakia; and, on the other, to ensure that the Sudetenland, the ostensible object of the German-Czechoslovak dispute, was handed over to Germany. Attolico, Weizsäcker, Henderson and François-Poncet would meet in secret to discuss in French to share information and to devise strategies to stop a war in 1938. Weizsäcker and Henderson both wanted a peaceful "chemical dissolution of Czechoslovakia", instead of the "mechanical dissolution" of war, which was favoured by Hitler and Ribbentrop. During Henderson's time in Berlin, he was closer to Weizsäcker than to any other German official except Göring.
Czechoslovakia
In October 1938, Henderson was diagnosed with cancer, which caused him to leave for London. From October 1938 to February 1939, the British Embassy in Berlin was run by the chargé d'affaires, Sir George Ogilvie-Forbes, a member of the Scottish gentry and a protégé of Vansittart. The dispatches from Berlin changed markedly as Ogilvie-Forbes stated his belief that Hitler's aims went beyond revising the Treaty of Versailles towards winning Germany "world power status". Ogilvie-Forbes wrote to London 6 December 1938 that based on the information he received, he believed that Hitler would start a war sometime in 1939 with Hitler divided only about whether it would be in Western Europe or in Eastern Europe. Unlike Henderson, who tended to gloss over the sufferings of German Jews, Ogilvie-Forbes gave far more attention to Nazi anti-Semitism. Ascher, himself a German Jew, noted in Ogilvie-Forbes's dispatches to London that there was a real sense of personal empathy with the sufferings of German Jews, which Henderson never displayed. After Hitler gave his "Prophecy Speech" to the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, Ogilvie-Forbes predicted that the "extermination" of Jews in Germany "can only be a matter of time". Henderson, by contrast, wrote that "Jews and Communists" were the principal "warmongers"; British Jews caused Germanophobia in Britain; Jews around the world would "move heaven and earth" to cause an Anglo-German war and "Jews, Communists and the intelligentsia" were the chief troublemakers in the world. To counter the negative reaction caused in Britain by the Kristallnacht pogrom, Henderson during his stay in London suggested to Herbert von Dirksen, the German ambassador to the Court of St James's that the persecution of German Jews be "regularized in an orderly and systematic manner" so as to reduce the offence given to British public opinion.
When Henderson returned to Berlin on 13 February 1939, his first action was to call a meeting of the senior staff of the British embassy, where he castigated Ogilvie-Forbes for his negative tone in his dispatches during his absence and announced that all dispatches to London would have to conform to his views, and that any diplomat who reported otherwise would be removed from the Foreign Office. On 18 February 1939, Henderson reported to London: "Herr Hitler does not contemplate any adventures at the moment ... all stories and rumours to the contrary are completely without foundation". In February 1939, Henderson cabled the Foreign Office in London:
If we handle him (Hitler) right, my belief is that he will become gradually more pacific. But if we treat him as a pariah or mad dog we shall turn him finally and irrevocably into one.
Prelude to war
During the Danzig Crisis, Henderson consistently took the line that Germany was justified in demanding the return of the Free City of Danzig and that the onus was on the Poles to make concessions to Germany by allowing it to "go home to the Reich". Henderson wrote to Halifax about Danzig and the Polish Corridor: "Can we allow the Polish government to be too uncompromising with them?" Henderson felt that the Versailles Treaty had been unjust towards Germany by creating the Free City of Danzig and giving the Polish Corridor and part of Silesia to Poland, and his preferred solution to the crisis would be Britain to pressure the Poles into concessions. However, Henderson also believed that Britain needed to deter Germany from attacking Poland while Britain pressured Poland into concessions and so favoured the "peace front" with the Soviet Union, despite his distrust, as the best form of deterrence.
On the eve of the Second World War, Henderson came into frequent conflict with Sir Alexander Cadogan, Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. Henderson argued that Britain should rearm secretly, as public rearming would encourage the belief that Britain planned to go to war against Germany. Cadogan and the Foreign Office disagreed with Henderson.
The signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact on 23 August 1939 and the Anglo-Polish military alliance two days later made war imminent. On the night of 30 August, Henderson had an extremely tense meeting with Ribbentrop. Ribbentrop presented the German "final offer" to Poland at midnight and warned Henderson that if he received no reply by dawn, the "final offer" would be considered to have been rejected. The American historian Gerhard Weinberg described the scene: "When Ribbentrop refused to give a copy of the German demands to the British Ambassador at midnight of 30–31 August 1939, the two almost came to blows. Ambassador Henderson, who had long advocated concessions to Germany, recognised that here was a deliberately conceived alibi the German government had prepared for a war it was determined to start. No wonder Henderson was angry; von Ribbentrop on the other hand could see war ahead and went home beaming".
While negotiating with Polish Ambassador Józef Lipski and advising accommodation over Germany's territorial ambitions, as he had during the Anschluss with Austria and the occupation of Czechoslovakia, Germany staged the Gleiwitz incident, and the invasion of Poland began on 1 September. Henderson had to deliver Britain's final ultimatum on the morning of 3 September 1939 to Ribbentrop that if hostilities between Germany and Poland did not cease by 11 a.m. that day, a state of war would exist between Britain and Germany. Germany did not respond and so Chamberlain declared war at 11:15 a.m. Henderson and his staff were briefly interned by the Gestapo before they returned to Britain on 7 September.
Later life
After he had returned to London, Henderson asked for another ambassadorship, but was denied. He wrote Failure of a Mission: Berlin 1937–1939, which was published in 1940, while staying at South Rauceby Hall, the home of an aunt in Lincolnshire. He spoke highly of some members of the Nazi regime, including Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring but not Ribbentrop. He had been on friendly terms with members of the Astors' Cliveden set, which also supported appeasement. Henderson wrote in his memoirs how eager Prince Paul of Yugoslavia had been to illustrate his military plans to counter Mussolini's projected assault on Dalmatia when the main body of the Italian Royal Army had been sent overseas. The historian A. L. Rowse described Failure of a Mission as "an appalling revelation of fatuity in high place".
In his memoir, Henderson stated: Atatürk (Mustafa Kemal) built a new Turkey on the ruins of the old; and his expulsion of the Greeks, which perhaps suggested to Hitler that he should do the same in Germany with the Jews, has already been forgotten and forgiven.
This has been compared to Hitler's Armenian reference, an alleged quote in which Hitler states "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"
Death
Henderson died on 30 December 1942 of cancer. He was then staying at the Dorchester Hotel, in London. Informed by his doctors that he had around six months left to live, he wrote an anecdote-filled diplomatic memoir, Water Under the Bridges, which was posthumously published in 1945. Its final chapter defends his work in Berlin and the policy of "appeasement," praises Chamberlain for being "an honest and brave man" and argues on behalf of the Munich Agreement on the grounds that Britain was too weak militarily in 1938 to have stood up to Hitler. It also asserts that if Germany had invaded Czechoslovakia, the latter would have fallen within a few months.