The Photographs History Forgot

Every so often a photograph surfaces that makes modern viewers sit up and blink. One of those shows cadets from the Britannia Brigade at Dartmouth standing alongside members of the Hitler Youth in 1936. It looks astonishing now. Future Royal Navy officers smiling politely beside boys in brown shirts.

I am 71 and, until a television documentary the other night, I had never heard of these exchanges at all. Which in itself is interesting. One would think such an image would have lodged somewhere in the national memory, yet apparently not.

Cue the inevitable modern reaction. Someone posts the photograph online and within minutes a few confident voices declare that this proves Britain was secretly rather fond of the Nazis. The photograph becomes Exhibit A in a tidy moral drama.

Except that is not what it shows.

The first thing to remember is that 1936 was a very different moment. Hitler had been in power only three years. The worst horrors of the regime were still largely hidden from the outside world. Diplomacy had not yet collapsed. Britain had just signed the Anglo German Naval Agreement the year before. The basic idea, misguided as it proved, was to keep Germany inside the tent rather than outside it kicking the furniture.

So youth exchanges happened. Military academies visited one another. Sports teams travelled abroad. It all sat inside the rather hopeful belief that if nations kept talking, marching and playing football together they might avoid repeating 1914.

From our vantage point the images look painfully naive. Within three years those cadets would be junior officers in the Royal Navy fighting the very regime whose youth organisation they had politely paraded beside. History has a habit of doing that. It makes yesterday's ordinary behaviour look absurdly innocent once tomorrow arrives.

What fascinates me is how these photographs are used today. They tend to be waved around as if they prove some hidden sympathy for Nazism in Britain. That tells you more about modern political habits than about the 1930s. People like tidy moral stories where everyone either knew exactly what was coming or secretly approved of it.

Real history is rarely that tidy.

In reality the picture simply captures a moment when Britain and much of Europe still hoped Germany could be handled through diplomacy and normal contact. They were wrong, catastrophically wrong, but they were not collaborating with Nazism. They were trying to avoid another continental war only eighteen years after the last one had ended.

Which, given what eventually happened in 1939, makes the photograph less scandalous and more quietly tragic. Those polite boys on both sides would soon be on opposite sides of a war that would kill tens of millions. And somewhere in a Dartmouth photo album there is probably still a neatly labelled page that reads something like "Visit to Germany, summer 1936".