The Daily Mail and its love affair with Hitler

Acknowledgements to the spartacus.schoolnet.com web site for the following excerpt

Hurrah for the Daily Mail!

Rothermere's newspapers continued to increase their circulation. By 1926 the daily sales of the Daily Mail had reached 2,000,000. Rothermere's personal wealth was now £25 million and he was estimated to be the third richest man in Britain.

Rothermere became increasingly nationalistic in his political views and in 1929 joined with Lord Beaverbrook to form the United Empire Party. Rothermere urged the Conservative Party to remove its leader, Stanley Baldwin, and replace him with Beaverbrook. He also argued for a reform of the House of Lords to make it possible for peers to be elected to the House of Commons. This dispute divided conservative voters and this enabled the Labour Party to win the 1929 General Election.

Lord Rothermere disposed of his shares in the Daily Mirror in 1931. He now concentrated on the Evening News and the Daily Mail. In the 1930s Rothermere moved further to the right and gave support to Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists. He wrote an article, 'Hurrah for the Blackshirts', in January, 1934, in which he praised Mosley for his "sound, commonsense, Conservative doctrine".

Proprietor of the Daily Mail, Lord Rothermere, with rising star, Adolf Hitler

Rothermere also had several meetings with Adolf Hitler and argued that the Nazi leader desired peace. In one article, written in March 1934, he called for Hitler [sic, Germany] to be given back land in Africa that had been taken as a result of the Versailles Treaty.

Rothermere and his newspapers supported Neville Chamberlain and his policy of appeasement. He was therefore devastated when war broke out between Britain and Germany in 1939.

Lord Rothermere died on 27th November, 1940.