Anti-German Sentiment - Early 20th Century

Early 20th Century

Following the signing of the Entente Cordiale in 1904 between Britain and France, attitudes towards Germany and German residents in Britain became very negative. A fear of German militarism replaced a previous admiration for German culture and literature. At the same time, journalists produced a stream of articles on the threat posed by Germany.

In 1894 Alfred Harmsworth had commissioned author William Le Queux to write the serial novel The Great War in England in 1897, which featured Germany, France and Russia combining forces to crush Britain. Twelve years later Harmsworth asked him to repeat this, promising the full support of his formidable advertising capabilities. The result was the bestselling The Invasion of 1910, which originally appeared in serial form in the Daily Mail in 1906 and has been referred to by historians as inducing an atmosphere of paranoia, mass hysteria and Germanophobia that would climax in the Naval Scare of 1908–09. Articles of the Daily Mail regularly advocated anti-German sentiments throughout the 20th century, telling British readers to refuse service at restaurants by Austrian or German waiters on the claim that they were spies and told them that if a German-sounding waiter claimed to be Swiss that they should demand to see the waiter's passport.

At the same time conspiracy theories were concocted combining Germanophobia with antisemitism, concerning the supposed foreign control of Britain, some of which blamed Britain's entry in to the Boer War on international financiers "chiefly German in origin and Jewish in race". Most of these ideas about German-Jewish conspiracies originated from right-wing figures such as Arnold White, Hilaire Belloc, and Leo Maxse, the latter using his publication the National Review to spread them.