I'm John Bachelor with Charles Spicer, whose rich new telling of the events in 1930s

before the catastrophe of the Second War opens new doors to me to understand the earnestness

of London and men in London and Berlin who are seeking to avoid the

conflict that we know, because we look backwards, is coming in 1939, the dictator and the

Nazi war machine. However, in 1935, the idea is to combine the ambitions of London and Berlin into the

Anglo-German Fellowship. The initial headquarters, I'm following Charles Spice's reporting,

is at the Metropole Hotel in London. That's where the headquarters are. And it immediately

attracts lots of business interests in the city, major industrialists,

publishers, newspaper publishers, who were barons of the public opinion at this time.

It's extremely, people join eagerly, it's almost, they're tumbling over themselves.

So is this a general feeling that if we

have a way of talking to Berlin, we can somehow deal with these horrible headlines of brutality

that we're reading towards the Jews? Yes, I think that the first people to get anxious

about the relationship between Britain and Germany are the

worlds of business and finance. So Unilever, which is companies, you know, still exists, major

international company, which have been created from a merger in the late 20s, between the Dutch

Marjorine Union and Lever brothers. That becomes one of the main financiers. And in fact, later on,

the fellowship holds its annual general meetings and its board meetings in Unilever's splendid

Art Deco Palace on the Thames in central London. To give context, they have 30,000 employees in

Germany, 100 subsidiaries. and doing, they're selling about a,

in modern terms, about a billion pounds worth annually, just of margarine. So they really don't

want another war and they want to understand this new regime. And it's not to say that they're comfortable with the stories of brutality,

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