Читать книгу Failure of a Mission, Berlin 1937-1939 - Nevile Meyrick Henderson - Страница 5
ОглавлениеBUENOS AIRES TO BERLIN
In January, 1937, when I had been just over a year at Buenos Aires as His Majesty’s Ambassador to the Argentine Republic, I received a telegram from Mr. Eden, then Foreign Secretary in Mr. Baldwin’s Cabinet, offering me the post of Ambassador at Berlin in succession to Sir Eric Phipps, who was being transferred to Paris in April. As the telegram was marked “personal,” I asked my secretary, Mr. Pennefather, to help me decode it; and I can still vividly recall my first reactions on ascertaining its contents. They were threefold. In the first place a sense of my own inadequacy for what was obviously the most difficult and most important post in the whole of the diplomatic service. Secondly, and deriving from the first, that it could only mean that I had been specially selected by Providence with the definite mission of, as I trusted, helping to preserve the peace of the world. And thirdly there flashed across my mind the Latin tag about failure and success which ominously observes that the Tarpeian Rock, from which failures were thrown to their doom, is next to the Capitol, where the triumph of success was celebrated. I might have hesitated more than I did about accepting Mr. Eden’s offer if I had not been persuaded of the reality of my second reaction, which seemed to me to outweigh every other consideration.
I left Buenos Aires in the middle of March. Though I had had a German governess as a small boy and had spent the best part of two years in Germany while preparing for the diplomatic examination, I had never during my thirty-two years’ service abroad been in a post where German was the spoken language, so that my knowledge of it was extremely rusty. It was partly for that reason that I took my passage back to England on the German liner Cap Arcona and provided myself with two copies of Hitler’s Mein Kampf to study on the way. The one had been given me by the German Ambassador at Buenos Aires, the other was an unexpurgated edition which I obtained privately. Though it was in parts turgid and prolix and would have been more readable if it had been condensed to a third of its length, it struck me at the time as a remarkable production on the part of a man whose education and political experience appeared to have been as slight, on his own showing, as Herr Hitler’s.
The Captain of the Cap Arcona was a certain Niejahr, who was afterward promoted to be Commodore of the North German Lloyd. He was a great favorite with all the British passengers on board, of whom there were a number, including the late Lord Mount Temple, who was at that time President of the Anglo-German Fellowship, but who resigned from that position after the Jewish persecutions in November, 1938. I had several talks with Captain Niejahr; and, on one occasion, pointing to his own high cheek bones, he drew my attention to the considerable admixture of Slav blood in many of the Germans and particularly of the Prussians. It is no coincidence that in the last war it was the Prussians rather than the Germans whom we regarded as our real enemies and that in the present one it is the Nazis, or followers of Hitler, and again not the Germans as a race. Though but few of the actual leaders of the National Socialist party are Prussians by origin, it is the Prussian ideology and particularly their methods which are no less dominant today in Germany than they were in 1914 or in 1870.
In a democracy the state is subordinated to the service of its citizens. In National Socialism, as interpreted by Hitler, the state is all in all; while the citizen has no individual personality and is but the obedient servant and slave of the state as personified in its leader, whose will is absolute (the Führerprinzip). The “leader” principle is derived directly from Fascism; but otherwise this conception of national philosophy is based entirely on the old Prussian theory of service to the state and obedience to command, as preached in the writings of its apostle, Immanuel Kant. In what proportion militant Prussianism is due to its Slavic blood mixture, to the harsh northeastern German climate, or to the militarism imposed on it by its old indefensible eastern frontiers is an open question. But the fact remains that the Prussians, of whom even Goethe spoke as barbarians, are a distinctive European type, which has imposed itself and its characteristics upon the rest of Germany. Also, from the point of view of the western world, it has prostituted or is prostituting the great qualities of order and efficiency, probity and kindliness of the purer German of Northwest, West, and South Germany, with whom an Englishman on his travels abroad finds himself in such natural sympathy.
Among the German passengers on board the Cap Arcona were Count and Countess Dohna, with whom, as I shall relate, I afterward stayed at their castle of Finckenstein in East Prussia; and Princess Frederick Leopold of Prussia, a sister of the late Empress, who was traveling with her only surviving son, destined later to be imprisoned by the Nazi Government. Apart, however, from having occasion to make my first attempt at a speech in German at a small dinner given to the Captain, by far the most interesting incident of the journey was our meeting with the new German airship Hindenburg, which, in the following May, was to become a total casualty with considerable loss of life at Lakehurst in the United States. She caught us up on her return journey from South America to Germany, and setting her engines as she reached us to the same speed as those of the Cap Arcona, she hung over our heads at about one hundred and fifty feet, a most impressive spectacle, for fully five or ten minutes while wireless messages were exchanged between the two craft. When she started her engines at full speed again, it was almost incredible how quickly she disappeared once more from view.
I reached Southampton on one of the last days of March and spent a hectic month in London seeing as many people as possible and occupied in all the numerous preparations which are necessary before one takes over a new post. My most important interview was, of course, with Mr. Neville Chamberlain, who was at that time Chancellor of the Exchequer but who was already Prime Minister designate, as Mr. Baldwin had some time previously announced his intention of retiring immediately after the Coronation, which was to take place on May 12th. Both he and Mr. Baldwin, whom I had seen earlier, agreed that I should do my utmost to work with Hitler and the Nazi party as the existing government in Germany. In democratic England the Nazis, with their disregard of personal freedom and their persecution of religion, Jews, and trade unions alike, were naturally far from popular. But they were the government of the country, and an ambassador is not sent abroad to criticize in a country the government which it chooses or to which it submits. It was just as much my duty honorably to try to co-operate with the Nazi Government to the best of my ability as it would be for a foreign ambassador in London to work with a Conservative Government, if it happened to be in power, rather than with the Liberal or Labor opposition, even though his own sympathies might possibly lie rather with the policy or ideologies of the latter. I was fully alive to the probability that the attempts which I intended to make to work with the Nazis and to understand their point of view would be criticized by many people in my own country. “Do what thy conscience bids thee do, from none but self expect applause.” Burton’s rule of conduct in life is not a bad one, provided one is a fairly strict critic of oneself, has a few real and candid friends, and does not easily applaud. Certainly, if one observes it, one is to a great extent armed against criticism.
Be that as it may, Mr. Chamberlain outlined to me his views on general policy toward Germany; and I think I may honestly say that to the last and bitter end I followed the general line which he set me, all the more easily and faithfully since it corresponded so closely with my private conception of the service which I could best render in Germany to my own country. I remember making but one reservation to Mr. Chamberlain, namely, that, while doing my utmost to work as sympathetically as possible with the Nazis, it was essential that British rearmament should be relentlessly pursued, since no argument could count with the government of Hitler except that of force. Mr. Chamberlain assured me that he equally appreciated this and that such was his own firm intention.
Inasmuch as any public attempt to co-operate with the Nazi Government would constitute somewhat of an innovation, I remember also asking Mr. Chamberlain whether, as Prime Minister, he would object to my being, if I thought it necessary, slightly indiscreet on first arrival in Berlin. His reply was to the effect that a calculated indiscretion was sometimes a very useful form of diplomacy and that he had himself recently had experience of its value.
