Читать книгу Failure of a Mission, Berlin 1937-1939 - Nevile Meyrick Henderson - Страница 13

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I had been just one month at Berlin when I was instructed by His Majesty’s Government to make the first of what was destined to be a series of definite and considered attempts by Mr. Chamberlain (who had now succeeded Lord Baldwin as Prime Minister) to improve Anglo-German relations. It consisted in an invitation to Baron von Neurath to come to London at an early date to discuss, primarily, naval control in Spain, in which Germany had ceased to participate after the attack on the pocket battleship Deutschland by Spanish Government bombers at Iviza, but also in general to review the whole external political situation. I recollect the hesitation on Neurath’s part when I first put forward the suggestion to him. He was in fact conversant—as I was not—with the inner difficulties of such a proposal. However, he said he would consult Hitler, though the visit could not, he pointed out, take place till after his return, namely, June 20th, from a tour of the Balkan capitals which had already been arranged for him. Nevertheless, in spite of this and some other minor difficulties, the invitation was eventually accepted, and announced to take place between the twenty-third and twenty-eighth of that month.

My satisfaction at this apparent success was short-lived, and was typical of the malignant fate which seemed to dog all our efforts to open the door to Anglo-German discussions. At first I was inclined to attribute this to ill chance, and it was not until later that I realized it was by design. On June 19th it was officially announced in Berlin that following the bombing of the Deutschland an unsuccessful torpedo attack had been made on the German cruiser Leipzig off Oran; and on the following day I received a brief private letter from Neurath telling me that his visit to London could not now take place. The twentieth of June was a Sunday, and I spent all the morning and the afternoon in trying to find the Minister for Foreign Affairs. He had, I think, regarded discretion as the better part of valor and disappeared into the country, destination unknown. I managed, however, to get hold of him late in the evening and went to see him at his private house in the garden of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. I told him that the Leipzig incident in itself only rendered his visit to London still more desirable, that I could not take his refusal to go there as a final answer without having first seen the Chancellor myself and put the case to him. Baron von Neurath was good enough to arrange this for me, and I had an interview with him and Hitler on the following morning.

Hitler had just come back from Wilhelmshaven, whither the Deutschland had returned to bury the thirty-odd sailors who had been killed in the bomb attack at Iviza. He was, as in the case of my first meeting with him after the Hindenburg disaster, in the emotional state into which he worked himself at the sight or report of any dead Germans. He refused to listen to any of my very logical arguments and persisted in the standpoint that he could not at such a moment permit his Foreign Minister to leave Germany. His attitude was so utterly unreasonable that I was at a loss to explain it even to myself. In the light of a better acquaintance later with the inner facts, I derived the conclusion that the Leipzig incident—the truth of which was never even verified—had merely served as a pretext for going back on an acceptance which had never really appealed to Hitler himself, but still less to his Ambassador in London, Herr von Ribbentrop. The latter, in addition to his London post, was Ambassador at Large, and felt that Neurath’s visit was detrimental to his own prestige and wounding to his personal vanity. He had the fatal defect of always looking for offense, and of having, in consequence, a perpetual “chip on his shoulder.” I feel sure that he did his utmost from the outset to dissuade his master from agreeing to the course proposed by His Majesty’s Government, and the Leipzig story enabled him to win his case. The notorious failure of his mission to London was already rankling, and it was intolerable that another should come and show up the personal cause of that failure. History will assuredly attribute a large share of the blame for September, 1939, to Ribbentrop; and his successful intrigue against Neurath’s visit to London was neither the first nor unfortunately the last instance of his sinister influence on the policy of his Führer. It was a disheartening beginning for myself, and the abrupt manner in which the visit was cancelled by the German Government was not encouraging for His Majesty’s Government. In accordance with the rules of ordinary civility, it would have been proper for the German Government, as soon as the excitement over the Leipzig incident had died down, themselves to suggest a later date for the visit. They did not, however, do so; and it was left to Mr. Chamberlain to take the initiative again and to make a second attempt, later in the year, to establish contact by sending Lord Halifax to Berlin.

As I have related earlier, the first of my purely personal efforts to improve relations with the Nazi rulers of Germany had been the speech which I had made at the dinner given to me in May by the Deutsch Englische Gesellschaft. My second was my attendance at the Nuremberg party rally in September. No British, French, or U. S. Ambassador had hitherto gone to Nuremberg, on the ground that as a party day it could not be regarded as a purely official meeting. For the first time my French colleague, M. François-Poncet; the U. S. Chargé d’Affaires, Mr. Gilbert; and myself were authorized in 1937 by our respective governments to attend the rally, albeit our presence there was limited to two days.

Nobody who has not witnessed the various displays given at Nuremberg during the week’s rally or been subjected to the atmosphere thereat can be said to be fully acquainted with the Nazi movement in Germany. It was an extremely necessary and useful experience, and not a single moment of my time during the two days I was there was left unoccupied. In addition to attending a review of the party leaders, 140,000 in number and representing at that time over 2,000,000 members of the party (a year later again at Nuremberg Hitler was to tell me himself that there were well over 3,000,000 party officials); a rally of the Hitler Youth, 48,000 strong, with 5,000 girls; at a supper party in Herr Himmler’s S.S. camp of 25,000 blackshirts, I had talks with Hitler himself, Neurath, Goering, and Goebbels, as well as a number of other less important personages.

The displays themselves were most impressive. That of the party leaders (or heads of the party organizations in the towns and villages throughout the country) took place in the evening at 8 P.M. in the stadium, or Zeppelinfeld. Dressed in their brown shirts these 140,000 men were drawn up in six great columns with passages between them, mostly in the stadium itself, but filling also all the tiers of seats surrounding the stadium and facing the elevated platform reserved for the Chancellor, his ministers, and his guards, the massed bands, official guests, and other spectators. Hitler himself arrived at the far entrance of the stadium, some 400 yards from the platform and, accompanied by several hundred of his followers, marched on foot up the central passage to his appointed place. His arrival was theatrically notified by the sudden turning into the air of the 300 or more searchlights with which the stadium was surrounded. The blue-tinged light from these met thousands of feet up in the air at the top to make a kind of square roof, to which a chance cloud gave added realism. The effect, which was both solemn and beautiful, was like being inside a cathedral of ice. At the word of command the standard bearers then advanced from out of sight at the far end, up the main lane and over the further tiers and up the four side lanes. A certain proportion of these standards had electric lights on their shafts, and the spectacle of these five rivers of red and gold rippling forward under the dome of blue light, in complete silence, through the massed formations of brownshirts, was indescribably picturesque. I had spent six years in St. Petersburg before the war in the best days of the old Russian ballet, but in grandiose beauty I have never seen a ballet to compare with it. The German, who has a highly developed herd instinct, is perfectly happy when he is wearing a uniform, marching in step, and singing in chorus; and the Nazi revolution has certainly known how to appeal to these instincts in his nature. As a display of aggregate strength it was ominous; as a triumph of mass organization combined with beauty it was superb.

The review of the Hitler Youth was no less an object lesson from an observer’s point of view. Standards, music, and singing again played a big part in the performance, and the fervor of youth was much in evidence. The speeches on that occasion were made by Hitler, Hess, and Baldur von Schirach, the leader of the Hitler Youth.

Rudolph Hess was the Führer’s deputy, appointed to represent him whenever or wherever he could not himself attend any function. In a sense he seemed to me to be a sort of adopted son to Hitler, and on the outbreak of war he was named as second after Goering in the order of succession to the leadership of the German nation. In less troublous times he might well have been named first, but his authority with the Army would scarcely have been great enough in wartime to hold the balance between the soldiers and the Nazi party. Hess, who was born in 1896, belonged to a merchant family established at Alexandria. Educated in Germany, he served in the last war, first in the infantry but later in the flying corps. Up to 1935 flying remained his hobby, and he actually won an important civil contest while a Cabinet Minister. After that Hitler forbade his risking his life by any further excursions in the air.

Hess was one of Hitler’s first collaborators and friends; and his membership in the party, as I have mentioned elsewhere, began in the early twenties. He took part in the Munich Putsch in November, 1923, was condemned after it to imprisonment, and shared Hitler’s confinement in the fortress of Landsberg. When Hitler took office in 1933, he was given Cabinet rank as a Minister without Portfolio.

Tall and dark, with beetling eyebrows, a famous smile, and ingratiating manners, Hess was perhaps the most attractive-looking of the leading Nazis. He was not inclined to be talkative and in conversation did not convey the impression of great ability. But people who know him best would have agreed that first impressions—and I never got further with him than that—were deceptive; and he certainly wielded more influence than people generally believed in Germany. I should have summed him up as aloof and inscrutable, with a strong fanatical streak which would be produced whenever the occasion required it.

That day, however, it was Schirach’s speech which, in spite of its painfully adulatory references to the Führer, impressed me most, though it was quite short, as befitting a wet morning on which it must have been most unpleasant for the boys, who had come from some distance, to stand in the rain. One part of Baldur von Schirach’s speech surprised me when, addressing the boys, he said: “I do not know if you are Protestants or Catholics; but that you believe in God, that I do know.” I had been under the impression that all reference to religion was discouraged among the Hitler Youth, and this seemed to me to refute that imputation. Theoretically, however, in spite of the revolt against the sacred books of the Jews, religion was free to the Hitler Youth; but, where and whenever it was possible to do so, it was in practice discouraged by various effective methods. The God of the Hohenzollerns had not saved Germany from defeat in 1918; and, though God might still be worshiped, it must be a purely German one, to whom Hitler was so closely allied as to be barely distinguishable from the Deity Himself.

Hitler in his speeches constantly referred to the Almighty. He was not an atheist, but merely pro-Hitler and anti-Christian. In the course of one of my interviews with him we touched upon the subject of religion. He was at the moment incensed against certain English bishops for supporting the case of Pastor Niemoller. He would not, he shouted, brook any further interference by English churchmen in the religious affairs of Germany. It was their meddling, he said, which had caused him to give orders for Niemoller to be put in a concentration camp after he had been set at liberty by the tribunal which had tried him for, and to all intents and purposes acquitted him of, sedition against the Nazi state. If, he continued, any English bishops tried to come to Germany they would be turned back at the frontier; and he concluded with the astounding statement that “nowhere was religion freer than in Germany.” It was the sort of remark to which I never was able to find an answer, nor would it have served any purpose if I had. His own National-Socialist religion, as he conceived it, with its German God was free, and that was what he meant and all he cared for. Furthermore, he could always make himself believe whatever he said. It was this kind of attitude which made ordinary conversation and argument with him and his imitator, Ribbentrop, so extraordinarily difficult and unsatisfactory.

The supper in a great tent in Herr Himmler’s S.S. police camp at Nuremberg was equally instructive in another sense. During supper a number of songs were sung by a chorus of blackshirts, and after it there was a tattoo for the lowering of the Swastika camp flag. The music as well as the bearing and drill of the special color party was exceptionally good. The S.S. played a big part in ruling Germany for Hitler, and they were picked men of powerful physique. “But,” as I wrote at the time, “the camp in the darkness, dimly lit by flares, with the black uniform in the silent background and the skull and crossbones on the drums and trumpets lent to the scene a sinister and menacing impression.” I felt, indeed, as if I were back in the days of Wallenstein and the Thirty Years’ War in the seventeenth century.

But, quite apart from the obvious menace of these various militaristic or para-military spectacles, Nuremberg gave me at the time the following chief impressions: Firstly, judging from the reports of the previous rallies, of a calmer atmosphere than heretofore, resulting partly from a growing sense of strength and self-confidence, but partly also from an increasing feeling of boredom; secondly, and deriving from the first, of a growing hope that Nazism might be entering upon a quieter phase; thirdly, as drawn from my conversation with the Nazi leaders, of the possibility of a better understanding between Britain and Germany; fourthly, of an increasing adulation of Hitler amounting almost to idolatry; and fifthly, of superlative organization.

As I have said before, I spent but two days at Nuremberg; and the atmosphere, however illuminating and instructive in respect of Nazism itself in a concentrated form, may have been scarcely that best suited to obtain a true picture of Germany as a whole, of her apprehension and discontents as distinct from the enthusiasm and chauvinism of the Nazi party there forgathered. Yet the Nazi party was Germany; and it was merely wishful thinking to imagine anything to the contrary.

Herr Hitler was more friendly to me personally on that occasion than on any of the others on which I saw him. He was undoubtedly pleased at the attendance for the first time of the British, French, and American representatives; and he indicated that he attributed this innovation to my initiative. I took the opportunity to tell him that the invitation to Baron von Neurath to visit London remained open if he cared to avail himself of it. In this respect, however, he was at once, and typically, less forthcoming. He said that he feared lest such a visit should give rise to exaggerated hopes, and observed that a preliminary requisite to such a visit should be a change in the attitude of the British press toward, and a juster appreciation in England of, Nazism.

As it happened, I had had a long talk with Dr. Goebbels at lunch that day on the subject of our respective presses; and I told Hitler so. There was nothing very new in that talk, and up to the last the press problem remained insoluble, but Goebbels had been friendly and sensible. The “little doctor” was probably the most intelligent, from a purely brain point of view, of all the Nazi leaders. He never speechified; he always saw and stuck to the point; he was an able debater and, in private conversation, astonishingly fair-minded and reasonable. Personally, whenever I had the chance, I found pleasure in talking to him. In appearance and in character he was a typical little Irish agitator, and was, in fact, probably of Celtic origin. He came from the Rhineland and had been educated in a Jesuit school. He was a slip of a man; but, in spite of his slight deformity, he had given proof of great courage when he fought the communists in Berlin and won the capital for Hitler and Nazism. When, however, he was on a public platform or had a pen in his hand no gall was too bitter and no lie too blatant for him.

Baron von Neurath, whom I saw the following day, was more forthcoming than Hitler. He told me that he found his Führer less resentful and more anxious for an understanding with Britain than he had been for a long time past. He did not, however, encourage me to think that Hitler would reopen the question of his visit to London. I remember that I asked him, in the course of conversation, what were Germany’s ultimate aims. His reply was: “Austria is the first and last of our aims; the Sudeten German problem is a matter for compromise and can be settled amicably, provided the Czechs leave the Russian orbit and give true equality to their German subjects.”

Such a statement was, as I was to discover, a characteristic example both of the half-truths indulged in whenever it was necessary to define German policy and of the deceptive nature of German assurances in general; i.e. readiness to admit an obvious objective, coupled with a positive declaration that nothing more thereafter was aimed at. It was so far true that Austria was in fact Hitler’s immediate objective. Of that there was no shadow of doubt, and in commenting on the greater calmness of the 1937 party rally, I had reported, “Germany today feels that she can not only afford to wait, but by waiting will be yet stronger and more sure of her goal. And the big goal is German unity. Of that let there be no mistake either; and if we intend definitely to oppose it, we should lose no time in asking ourselves the first and capital question ‘How?’ ” It was already quite evident that it would be futile to say “no” to the Dictator without being prepared to go to war to enforce it.

The question of the Austrian Anschluss was also mentioned in a long conversation which I had with General Goering at this time. He insisted that it was inevitable; and he told me that a few days earlier he had seen Herr Guido Schmidt, the Austrian Minister for Foreign Affairs, and had bluntly told him that the sooner the Austrian Government accepted it as such, and without creating bad blood, the better it would be for all concerned. But the greater part of my interview with Goering on that occasion was on the subject of a request which I had made to him in July for a written statement of (a) Germany’s concrete grievances against Britain in the matter of our alleged attempt to hem Germany in, and (b) her ultimate aims. Needless to say, I never received such a reply in writing, though Goering was always ready to talk and to express views “subject to Hitler’s confirmation or consent.” This time the General begged the question, as he had done in July, by saying that he would consult Hitler again and might be able to give me the answer I wanted if I came and shot a stag with him at Rominten, in East Prussia, during the first week of October—an invitation which I was delighted to accept.

As usual Goering was very outspoken and at times bellicose. Yet our many talks, in spite of complete frankness on both sides, were never conducted on any but mutually friendly lines. He suffered comparatively little from the personal resentments which so often inspired Hitler and Ribbentrop, and up to the last I was inclined to believe in the sincerity of his personal desire for peace and good relations with England. He laid stress on this at Nuremberg, though at the same time he added that, if the British Empire refused to collaborate with Germany, there would be nothing for the latter to do but to devote herself to the destruction of that Empire instead of to its maintenance. In that connection he mentioned to me, and was the first German to do so, the possibility of the Reich being compelled to revise the Anglo-German Naval Agreement. I told him then, and again some months later, that such a step would inevitably lead in the end once more to war with Britain. He regretfully admitted that this might be so and added that it was against his advice that Hitler had insisted, when he did, on the conclusion of that Agreement. Baron von Neurath once told me the same thing, the argument of both of them being that Hitler should have kept the Naval Agreement as a trump card up his sleeve for eventual use in a final bargain. They were both more honest in this respect than Hitler, since, from Goering’s remark, I fancy that the contingency of repudiating that treaty was already in Hitler’s mind; and, judging by subsequent experience, I can only conclude that he never intended to observe its terms longer than it suited him. It was difficult or even materially impossible for him to rebuild a navy at the same time that he was re-creating his immensely formidable military and air machine; and the sole object, in Hitler’s mind, of the Naval Agreement was to disarm British opposition to his schemes in Central Europe until such time as they came to fruition and were realized. Thereafter it would be the turn of the British Empire. It is impossible today to draw any other conclusion. There is a passage in Rauschning’s book, The Revolution of Nihilism,^[1] which is illuminating in this respect, particularly in view of the writer’s intimacy at one time with Hitler. He writes of the latter as follows:

He was ready to sign anything. He was ready to guarantee any frontier and to conclude a non-aggression pact with anyone. [According to Hitler himself] it was a simpleton’s idea that expedients of this sort were not to be made use of, because the day might come when some formal agreement had to be broken. Every pact sworn to was broken or became out of date sooner or later. Anyone who was so fussy that he had to consult his own conscience about whether he could keep a pact, whatever the pact and whatever the situation, was a fool. He could conclude any pact and yet be ready to break it the next day in cold blood, if that was in the interests of the future Germany.

Such was Hitler’s own profession of faith about the sanctity of treaties and his plighted word. Verb. sap. But at that time, it was still possible to hope for the best; and after a brief holiday at Belje in Yugoslavia, shooting stags in my old haunts at the invitation of the Prince Regent, I proceeded to Rominten to stay with Goering as he had suggested.