Tea with the Fuhrer!

After energetically courting the Nazis, George Ward Price became Hitler's go-to British journalist during the Thirties... enjoying a series of astonishing scoops and becoming one of the most influential and controversial reporters of his era

- By Richard Evans

IT WAS a day when the world held its collective breath. This week, 87 years ago, PM Neville Chamberlain had just had his historic first meeting with Adolf Hitler. The question on everyone’s lips was whether it had been a futile last effort to stop an inevitable conflict, or if it really might pull Europe back from the brink of a devastating new war.

When it came to the answer, much of it would lie with the attitude of Hitler.

Was he prepared to compromise on the details of how he absorbed Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland into the Reich? Or would he insist on doing it in a way that would risk war with Britain and France?

And did the Sudetenland represent the end of his territorial ambitions, or was it just the latest staging post towards his ultimate aim of European domination?

For almost everyone, this was a question shrouded in doubt. But there was one Englishman who could claim to be better informed about Hitler’s thinking than almost anyone else. Because on September 17, 1938, as the world was waiting and wondering, the journalist George Ward Price was sitting down to take tea with Hitler and his acolytes in their Eagle’s Nest hideaway in the Bavarian mountains.

Over five years, Ward Price had worked relentlessly to get to know the Nazi leadership. He realised the rise of Nazi Germany was the story of the decade, and he knew that beating his journalistic rivals depended on him getting to know those at the heart of the story.

And with his smooth and debonair manner, no one was better than Ward Price at cultivating relationships with contacts.

It was an effort that had already led to a series of astonishing scoops.