3/16: EVE OF ANOTHER GERMAN ELECTION: Coffee With Hitler: The Untold Story of the Amateur Spies Who Tried to Civilize the Nazis Hardcover – by Charles Spicer (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 23 February 2025
⏱️ 12 minutes
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Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Coffee-Hitler-Untold-Amateur-Civilize/dp/1639362266
"How might the British have handled Hitler differently?” remains one of history’s greatest "what ifs."
Coffee with Hitler tells the astounding story of how a handful of amateur British intelligence agents wined, dined, and befriended the leading National Socialists between the wars. With support from royalty, aristocracy, politicians, and businessmen, they hoped to use the recently founded Anglo-German Fellowship as a vehicle to civilize and enlighten the Nazis.
1932 BERLIN
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBSI and the world. I'm John Batchel. The book is Coffee with Hitler, the Untold |
| 0:09.9 | Story of the Amateur Spies, who tried to civilize the Nazis. Charles Spicer is the author, |
| 0:15.4 | and these are revelations of scenes and conduct that I had no knowledge of all these decades of reading about the |
| 0:23.5 | catastrophe of the Second War. We now go to September 1935 at Nuremberg, the annual rally |
| 0:31.6 | of the Nazi party, capped off by a speech by the dictator. We introduce Graham Christie, a man who is quite as romantic as Hollywood could imagine. |
| 0:44.8 | Charles Spicer has done us the extreme favor of recovering Graham Christie in his modesty and his heroism, his whole life. |
| 0:53.8 | He was an aviator, a war hero, and a man who risked his life again and again |
| 0:59.8 | to find a way to avoid the war that was ahead in 39. |
| 1:05.8 | Charles Graham Christie is so much, it's so overwhelming. |
| 1:09.8 | What is important to know about him and his role in the |
| 1:13.4 | Anglo-German fellowship? It's very important to understand his First World War track record. |
| 1:21.1 | And he was an engineer. He'd been at school in Britain, which he'd hated, and went straight from that, from high school |
| 1:29.7 | to Germany, where he studied as an engineer, where he excelled. So he's completely fluent in |
| 1:36.0 | German and a Germanophile. He learns to fly. He's one of the first people, you know, one of |
| 1:43.8 | the first aviators in the world, one of the first people to achieve powered flight. |
| 1:47.9 | He commissions his own plane in 1913 and tours the north of England demonstrating with another pilot. |
| 1:55.4 | It's a two-seater, this biplane, to people who've never seen aircraft before. |
| 2:03.4 | And when the war breaks out in the summer of 1914, by that point he owns two planes. He gives them to the British Army and signs up as a junior |
| 2:11.9 | officer, even though he's in his 30s, so quite old when the average pilot's only 20. |
| 2:18.0 | He joins up and he flies throughout the war. |
| 2:21.2 | And he is, as well as being a brilliant engineer, he's a brilliant aviator. |
| 2:25.6 | He was one of the very first people to do tactical bombing. |
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