http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2090-2372519,00.html

The Sunday Times September 24, 2006

Lord Reith revered Hitler, says daughter

LORD REITH, [a Scot] founder of the BBC and a member of Churchill’s wartime cabinet, was a Nazi sympathiser who abhorred Jews, according to a candid biography by his daughter.
Marista Leishman claims her father respected Hitler and Mussolini and adopted some of the principles espoused by the German chancellor in the running of the BBC.

She claims that her father was open in his admiration of the fascist leaders and continued to praise Hitler and his regime, even after the German invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939.

Reith, the son of a Free Church of Scotland minister, was a strict Presbyterian who carried his religious views into his work at the BBC. When asked whether he was going to give the people what they wanted, Reith replied: “No. Something better than that.”

He went on to serve with distinction during the second world war as Britain’s minister of information, then transport, then minister of works, before joining the Royal Navy and playing a key role in organising the D-Day liberation of France. He was elevated to the peerage as the 1st Baron of Stonehaven.

In My Father — Reith of the BBC, Leishman reveals that her late father took to “celebrating Hitler and his policies” while director-general in the 1930s. “Over lunch in the Carlton in 1935 he told Marconi (the radio inventor), how much he had always admired Mussolini for having ‘achieved high democratic purpose by means which, though not democratic, were the only possible ones’,” she writes.

“He was dissatisfied with the BBC and, remarking how much he admired Hitler for his magnificent efficiency, he mused that his real calling was for dictatorship”.

As the first director-general he was responsible for banning the playing of jazz music, which he regarded as “vulgar”, following the lead of the Nazi regime.

He wrote in his diary: “Germany has banned hot jazz and I’m sorry that we (Britain) should be behind in dealing with this filthy product of modernity.”

As early as March 9, 1933, shortly after Hitler seized control of the Reichstag, he recorded his admiration for Nazism. “I am certain that the Nazis will clean things up and put Germany on the way to being a real power in Europe again . . . They are being ruthless and most determined.”

Although Reith worked against Hitler’s regime, passing information to the Foreign Office that he believed might be useful against the Third Reich, he persisted in his admiration for the German chancellor. In March 1939, when Prague was occupied, he wrote: “Hitler continues his magnificent efficiency.”