Hitler’s Munich Man: The Fall of Admiral Sir Barry Domville
Admiral Domville was a distinguished naval officer during WW1 who later became Director of Naval Intelligence. After retiring in 1936 he became a high-profile Nazi sympathiser and founded The Link, an organisation which spread Nazi propaganda in Britain. Imprisoned without trial in 1940, he was released in 1943 and continued to be active in Right Wing politics until his death in 1960.
Hitler’s Munich Man centres on the Admiral’s arrest and interrogation and the efforts of the intelligence service (MI5) to prevent his release. The author quotes extensively from hitherto unpublished documents and concludes that Domville was never a threat to national security, merely an ‘old fool’. Domville later described himself as a ‘Munich Man’, a peacemaker who had supported the 1938 Munich agreement with Hitler which tried to stave off the war. My own opinion is that he was a convinced Nazi and a fervent anti-Semite who courted imprisonment to raise his standing in Right Wing circles. Had Britain been defeated he would have been a prominent member of any collaborationist government that might have been set up. Luckily History passed him by.
This is not an easy read, but it will be useful to those interested in pro-Nazi activities in Britain in the 1930s and ’40’s. The nation was not as undivided as Churchill wanted us to believe.
