Читать книгу Failure of a Mission, Berlin 1937-1939 - Nevile Meyrick Henderson - Страница 7

Table of Contents

Fortified by this understanding attitude on the part of the future Prime Minister, I left for Germany on April 29th. Before, however, describing the dramatic events of the next two years, I wish to make quite clear to my readers the principles which guided me in undertaking my mission to Berlin.

I was, above all, convinced that the peace of Europe depended upon the realization of an understanding between Britain and Germany. I was consequently determined: firstly, to do all in my power to associate with the Nazi leaders, and if possible to win their confidence and even sympathy; and, secondly, to study the German case as objectively as possible and, where I regarded it as justified, to present it as fairly as I could to my own government. To those two rules I adhered throughout my two and a quarter years in Berlin. I honestly endeavored, where I could do so without sacrificing the principles or the interests of my country, both to understand the German external viewpoint and to see what was good in its social experiment, without being blind to what was bad. My mission to Germany was a tragic failure, but at least my own conscience in this respect is clear. The modern ambassador is but a small cog in the machinery of a twentieth-century government, but nobody strove harder for an honorable and just peace than I did. That all my efforts were condemned to failure was due to the fanatical megalomania and blind self-confidence of a single individual and of a small clique of his self-interested followers. I say this in no spirit of bitterness, but with the conviction drawn from the experience of two years’ close observation and contact. For the fact of the matter is that one of the things for which we have gone to war today is to decide whether, in the future, the fatal arbitrament of peace or war, not only for a great nation but for the world, is again to rest in the hands of a single individual, and, as in this case, an abnormal one. In other words, this is a war for the principles of democracy.

What I wish here to stress, however, is the honesty of the intentions which inspired me when I went to Berlin in 1937, and which afforded the Nazi Government every opportunity for frank co-operation with me. I may have erred in optimism, but not in cynicism, in hoping as long as possible for the best and in refusing to be convinced, until the worst proved me wrong, that the intentions of others were as evil as they seemed.

Nor did I lose any time in making clear to the Germans the standpoint which I proposed to adopt. Just a month after my arrival the German-English Society of Berlin, which corresponded to the Anglo-German Fellowship in London, were so good as to give a dinner in my honor. The President of this Society was, very suitably, H.R.H. the Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, whom, as Duke of Albany, I had known as an Eton boy and afterward as a German student at Bonn, where I had spent three months in 1903 when studying for my diplomatic examination. A large number of the leading Nazis attended the banquet; and, taking advantage of the license granted me by Mr. Chamberlain, I committed the indiscretion of making there a speech which aroused considerable criticism in certain circles in England, and which earned for me in some British journals the application of “our Nazi British Ambassador at Berlin.” I have never felt the least remorse about that speech. It may have been prejudicial to the usefulness of my reports on Germany, to be regarded by some of my own countrymen as “pro” anything except British. But that was inevitable at a moment when everyone was being labeled “pro” something or other.

Before ever I went to Germany, I had twice had experience of the same superficiality of judgment. When I was at Constantinople, in the days of Chanak and the Lausanne Conference, General Harington and myself were both labeled as pro-Turk. Both he and I would gladly accept that reputation today. Again, when I was Minister at Belgrade in the early nineteen thirties, and largely because I happened to be a friend of the late King Alexander, I was condemned as being pro-Yugoslav and pro-dictator. People in England sometimes forget that there are “less happier lands” than theirs, and fail to realize that even dictators can be, up to a point, necessary for a period and even extremely beneficial for a nation. I say “up to a point” because the ancient Romans, who were the first to invent dictators to deal with crises, were wiser than their successors today, in that they carefully restricted dictatorial powers to a limited period of months. Few impartial historians would deny the uses of Cromwell, even in England, after the troubles of the civil war; and the crop of dictators which sprang up in Europe after the chaos of the 1914-1918 world war is explicable for the same reasons. It is a curious fact, parenthetically, that Hitler himself, who is a great reader of history, and especially so since his accession to power (Baron von Neurath once told me that his Führer knew far more history than he did himself), at one time made a particular study of Cromwell, who, among other things, died in his bed. Goering, too, mentioned to me on one occasion the names of two books which he also had read on the life of the Protector. The fact, indeed, is that dictators only become an unqualified evil for their own subjects and a danger for their neighbors when power goes to their heads and ambition and the desire for permanence drives them to oppression or adventure. Nor are all dictatorships, even if prolonged, reprehensible. Ataturk (Mustapha Kemal) built up a new Turkey on the ruins of the old; and his expulsion of the Greeks, which perhaps suggested to Hitler that he should do the same in Germany with the Jews, has already been forgotten and forgiven. One cannot, just because he is a dictator, refuse to admit the great services which Signor Mussolini has rendered to Italy; nor would the world have failed to acclaim Hitler as a great German if he had known when and where to stop; even, for instance, after Munich and the Nuremberg decrees for the Jews. Dr. Salazar, the present dictator of Portugal, who has set himself his own limitations and abided by them, is assuredly one of the wisest statesmen which the postwar period has produced in Europe. Dictatorships are not always evil; and, however anathematic the principle may be to us, it is unfair to condemn a whole country or even a whole system because parts of it are bad. Many dogs have been hanged simply for their bad name; and who was I to condemn the Nazis offhand or before they had finally proved themselves incurably vicious? Anyway, I do not concede to anyone the right to label me as anything but pro-British. I had told Mr. Eden before I left London that I should probably incur the appellation of pro-German; and if there were people who continued to regard me, till the end of my time at Berlin, as too pro-Nazi or pro-German or pro-anything at all except British, theirs was the mistake.

Moreover, whatever the detriment may have been of having such a reputation in certain quarters in England, it was outweighed, from the point of view of my work on behalf of British interests, by the sympathy which the sincerity of my attitude immediately won for me with the general public in Germany. With one rather interesting exception the text of my speech at the dinner of the German-English Society was published in full in all the German papers. Toward the end of it, with a view to enlisting the support of German women for the peace for which I pleaded, I quoted a verse of a song which, if I remember rightly, had been popular in America during the antiwar Wilson election there in 1916. It ran as follows:

I did not raise my son to be a soldier,

I brought him up to be my pride and joy.

Who dares to put a musket on his shoulder

To kill some other Mother’s darling boy?

I was told afterward that it had been purposely omitted, lest German mothers should really think that their sons were not solely born to die for Hitler and for Germany.

Admittedly, foreign relations are an ambassador’s sole concern; and it is no business of his to refer in speeches to the internal affairs of the country in which he is living. But Germany was no normal state, and one could not ignore Nazism when referring to Germany. In point of fact, my reference to the Nazi regime constituted but a small part of a speech in which I attempted to explain frankly and honestly the attitude which I proposed to adopt toward the German Government and the Nazi party, since it was the latter which actually governed Germany. Its whole theme was the necessity for the peaceful negotiation of outstanding problems. Provided that line was adopted, all would, I said, be well; and I told my listeners that I could assure them that the reproach, which had been repeatedly made to me, to the effect that Britain was attempting to hem Germany in was untrue. I reminded them that, on presenting my letters of credence to the Reich Chancellor, I had said to Hitler that I was convinced that there was no question between our two countries which could not be solved by peaceful good will and mutual co-operation. I observed that those words came from the bottom of my heart and I concluded as follows: “Guarantee us peace and peaceful evolution in Europe, and Germany will find that she has no more sincere and, I believe, more useful friend in the world than Great Britain.” That was in fact the whole basis of my policy.

The sentence which gave most offense to the left wing and others in England was that in which I remarked that it would be better if people in England laid less stress on the Nazi dictatorship and paid more attention to the great social experiment which was being tried out in Germany. I said that, if they did so, they might learn some useful lessons; and I regretted that too much concentration on those trees which appeared misshapen in English eyes rendered us insufficiently appreciative of the forest as a whole. One member of Parliament’s comment thereon in the House of Commons was to the effect that “our old democracy has nothing to learn from Nazism.” A laudably British sentiment, which might have been applied to Stalin’s brand of Russian Communism as well as to German Nazism; nevertheless, one must pray that those who are responsible for the conduct of the war against Nazi Germany will not be guilty of the same fatuity. There are “sermons in stones and good in everything”; and there are, in fact, many things in the Nazi organization and social institutions, as distinct from its rabid nationalism and ideology, which we might study and adapt to our own use with great profit both to the health and happiness of our own nation and old democracy.

To my own countrymen I would, for instance, particularly recommend the labor camps. Between the age of seventeen and nineteen every German boy, rich or poor, the son of a laborer or of a former reigning prince, is obliged to spend six months in a labor camp, building roads, draining marshland, felling trees, or doing whatever other manual labor may be required in his area. In my humble opinion these camps serve none but useful purposes. In them not only are there no class distinctions, but on the contrary an opportunity for better understanding between the classes. Therein one learns the pleasure of hard work and the dignity of labor, as well as the benefits of discipline; moreover, they vastly improve the physique of the nation. The average weight which a German boy puts on during those six months is thirteen German pounds or a little over fourteen of our pounds of bone and muscle.

Few people in the twentieth century would deny that, with all its horrors and in spite of the ills of the Napoleonic epoch, the French Revolution left behind it theories and systems which were of lasting benefit to mankind. National Socialism is no less a revolution; and, however odious its ideology may today appear to most of us, just as did the French Revolution to our forebears at the end of the eighteenth century, it would be foolish to assume either that there is nothing to be learned from it, or that it will vanish in all its forms “unwept, unhonored and unsung” from this earth. Others have described with greater authority and competence the utility and beneficial nature of many of the institutions, such as, among others, the Strength through Joy movement, developed by the “socialist” rather than the “national” part of National Socialism. I do not propose to comment here on this. But it would be utterly unjust not to realize that great numbers of those who adhered to and worked for Hitler and the Nazi regime were honest idealists, whose sole aim was to serve Germany, to improve the lot of her people, and to add to their happiness. Hitler himself may well have been such an idealist at the start. Later he undoubtedly used this idealism as a cloak to justify the continued existence of the regime and of its leaders. But there were others who were true to their principles, and I left Germany with feelings of high regard for men like Dr. Gurtner, the Minister of Justice; Graf Schwerin von Krosigk, the Minister of Finance; Dr. Lammers, the head of the Reichschancery; as well as for many others in various walks of official life in Germany. Of all the qualities of the German race its capacity for organization is outstanding, and Germany owes much to the astounding organizing ability of men like Field Marshal Goering; Dr. Frick, the Minister of the Interior; Dr. Todt, the Director of Roads and Construction; Herr Hierl, the head of the Labor Service Administration; as well as to the soldiers, sailors, and airmen who built up the machine and restored Germany to her present formidable position. Most of us would have been proud to do for our own country what these and others like them did for theirs. It is not the machine which one must blame, but the uses to which it was put and the mind behind it.

Far be it from me to criticize those I have mentioned and many others like them. The mistake which was too easily made abroad was to condemn everything that was Nazi just because its ideology was contrary to ours and because some of its principles and many of its practices were utterly and inexcusably cruel and horrible. Ideological hatreds can be as dangerous to the peace of mankind as the ambitions of a dictator. Both involve the loss of sanity of judgment and of sense of proportion. The result at home was too much criticism and too little constructiveness in respect to Nazi Germany. If Central Europe were to settle down to peace, something more than criticism was essential.

It is probably true to say that, whatever attitude we had adopted toward Hitler and the Nazi gangsters, the result today would have been the same. Nevertheless, throughout those years from 1933 to 1938 we were not, in my opinion, always fair to Germany; and by being unfair we weakened our own case and merely strengthened that of the Nazis. The British tendency to self-righteousness played too big a part in our judgments, and Nazi methods blinded us sometimes to the arguable aspects of some of their contentions. We were too apt to make realities out of wishes and facts out of phrases. There can be no change of heart in Germany unless it comes from within; and we shall never inculcate true democratic ideas in the German people or persuade them to realize the higher responsibilities attached to force and strength, unless and until we ourselves treat Germany with strict impartiality and fairness.

One has heard much since the beginning of the war about there being or not being two Germanys: one, kindly, studious, and pacific; and the other, cruel, militarist, and aggressive. In wartime there can only be one Germany, which has to be fought and defeated. The innocent and the guilty have to suffer alike. Yet that does not alter the fact that there are two Germanys, and the outlook for the future would indeed be sad and hopeless if it were not so. Granted that the passive majority of decent Germans allow themselves today to be governed by a brutal and unscrupulous minority. Granted also that German history tends to show that this has generally been the case. Granted that Hitler is merely a typical example of an attitude of mind which has caused war after war. For it is, of course, the case that, in the last seventy years or so, Germany has initiated or been principally responsible for five wars; against Denmark and Austria in the eighteen sixties, against France in 1870, the war of 1914, and the present one. It is consequently argued that the passive majority always joyfully and willingly follows whither the aggressive minority leads and that it will always be the same. To my mind this argument is erroneous. It is equivalent to asserting that, because the Germans are sheep (and Hitler in Mein Kampf himself so describes the masses of the German people), therefore, they are goats. The wars of the last eighty years may yet prove to have been the evolutionary birth pains of German unity. Fearful thinkers may regard German unity as a consummation to be resisted to the last. A grave danger it certainly is, since no one can deny the German’s tendency to be a bully when he is strong. Yet can evolution ever be more than retarded, and will not the price be too high if we persist in opposing that unity just because it is a hypothetical danger? Should not our object rather be to educate Germany politically up to a truer conception of civilization? We cannot do this unless there are in fact two Germanys. We have to help the sheep, if they are not always to follow the goats. Maybe this will never be possible unless we can first prove to the sheep, by the completeness of their defeat, that butting does not pay.

One cannot, however, be unfair in one’s strictures on one branch of the Nazi system, and that is the Gestapo (Geheimstaatspolizei), or secret state police, under the command of Herr Himmler.

Himmler was for me the most enigmatical and elusive of all the Nazi leaders. Instinctively I distrusted him from the beginning more than any of the others. Yet, when one did meet and talk to him, it was scarcely possible to believe that this mild-looking and bespectacled young man, with his somewhat deprecatory manner and the appearance of a provincial schoolmaster, could be the tyrant directly responsible for the persecution of the so-called enemies of the state. Yet so it was, though it was often said that in police matters he was much under the influence of his right-hand man and second-in-command, Reinhard Heydrich, a notoriously unscrupulous and brutal gangster.

Born in Munich in 1900 and thus too young to have fought in the last war, Himmler was, nevertheless, one of the earliest adherents of the Hitler movement. He was the founder of the S.S., which was originally formed in 1922 as a small but specially trustworthy bodyguard for Hitler.

Up to 1933 he remained merely as chief of the S.S. and of the new Bavarian political police. He never advertised and rarely made political speeches. But, like a mole, he worked unceasingly underground; and his galleries were burrowed under the whole fabric of the German state. By 1936 he had succeeded not only in largely increasing the numbers of the S.S. but in getting under his own sole command the whole of the police forces of the Reich. It required a sharp struggle between him and Goering, who had hitherto controlled the Prussian police, before he could achieve this; but it was Himmler and not the Field Marshal who emerged victorious from it. Thereafter the power of the Gestapo silently and unobtrusively increased, until at the end there was no more powerful man in Germany under Hitler than Himmler.

Endowed with considerable moral and physical courage, the personal impression he gave me was one of desperate ambition and fanatical ruthlessness, but also of great efficiency. He was supposed to live simply, but he had a luxurious villa at Tegernsee in his native Bavaria, with extensive gardens and a private road, and surrounded by the barracks of his own blackshirted bodyguard. In the confusion of the private jealousies which were rife among the more powerful followers of the Führer, it was difficult at times to be sure of the various combinations, which were not always static. But Himmler and Ribbentrop were definitely allies: and a thoroughly mischievous combination they were, though, of the two, Himmler, in view of his undoubted ability, natural fanaticism, and greater intelligence was the more sinister figure.

The Gestapo was and is in all its forms and in all its aspects by far the most loathsome and detestable part of the Nazi regime. I do not need to refer to the brutalities of the concentration camps at Dachau or at Buchenwald, the two most notorious of them, and elsewhere. They have formed the subject of a White Paper published by His Majesty’s Government after the outbreak of war; and this nauseating aspect of political hooliganism and barbarous sadism can be left to the judgment of civilized opinion. I once did my best to persuade Goering to use his influence with a view to their abolition. His answer was typical. After listening to all I had to say, he got up without a word and went to a bookcase from which he took a volume of the German Encyclopaedia. Opening it at Konzentrationslager (concentration camps) he read out, “First used by the British, in the South African War.” He was pleased with his own retort; but the truth of the matter was that, though it was he who had originally formed these camps when he was Minister of Police for Prussia, he had no longer anything to do with them. They were entirely under the control of Himmler.

Not even in the days of Abdul Hamid in Constantinople was the horrible system of spying and denunciation carried to greater extremes than in Berlin and throughout Germany. One of Dr. Goebbels’ propaganda films showed as its “hero” a small German boy who denounced his father and mother to their death at the hands of the Gestapo. The pogrom of the Jews in November, 1938, was entirely organized by Himmler’s own policemen disguised as hooligans. The imprisonments and brutalities in Austria after March, 1938, were the work of the secret police. When Goering went to Vienna at the end of that month, he released several thousand of these unfortunates, among them one or two whom I had specially recommended to him on the ground that loyalty to their Emperor was a virtue in itself and could not be regarded as a crime. As soon as the Field Marshal returned to Berlin, the Gestapo, which had full and separate powers, lost no time in reincarcerating them. What the Czechs and Poles are suffering today is mainly the work of Himmler’s Gestapo and blackshirts. One might give examples of their bestiality ad infinitum.

The Gestapo did more real harm to Germany’s and the Nazi’s reputation than anything else; and throughout my time in Germany I never ceased to inveigh against it to all who would listen to me. I remember that, at the time of the Munich Conference, when it had been decided that the Sudeten Lands should be progressively occupied by the German forces, I begged General Keitel to do his utmost to secure that the occupation was carried out, to the exclusion of the Gestapo, solely by the German soldiers, whose conduct as proved during the “rape” of Austria was always exemplary.

If I were entitled to apportion the blame for the tragic and ghastly war we have now entered, I should do so as follows: firstly, the overweening ambition and ever growing megalomania of Hitler; secondly, the self-interested and pernicious advice of Herr von Ribbentrop and of the small clique of Nazi veterans and gangsters, of whose names the world has never heard, who fought with Hitler in the streets and on the barricades and to whom, for their services in the struggle for power, were given many of the plums of victory such as the jobs of Reichstag Deputies, Gauleiters, etc.; and thirdly, Himmler and his blackshirted S.S. and secret police.

The vicious oppression of the Gestapo, the bestialities of the prisons and concentration camps, the degradation of the system of spying and denunciation not only constituted for me by far the most repugnant feature of the Nazi regime, but also represented for me one of the most unaccountable sides of the German character. Whatever his faults may be, the Anglo-Saxon is, without any doubt whatsoever, the kindliest creature in the world. To one who has lived abroad as much as I have, this is particularly apparent. Each time that I return to England and meet the first porter at Dover I am struck by this immediately noticeable characteristic. Even in his civil wars, unless it be for the brief episode of Judge Jeffries after Sedgemoor, the Englishman has never indulged in extensive persecution or torture for torture’s sake. The streak of sadism in his Teuton cousin is the more inexplicable for that reason; for the German individual in normal life is as kindly as the Englishman, and his love for children and animals no less natural and sincere. But, put him in any abnormal position of authority, and in the majority of cases he will at once abuse it. Even in the old German Army, the N.C.O. bullied the private and the lieutenant the N.C.O. and so on. Perhaps it is the only language which the German thoroughly understands. I have endeavored earlier in this history to find some explanation for this in the very considerable amount of Slav blood which flows in the German veins. The mixture is probably a bad one; yet it cannot do more than account partially for this distressing and distinctive trait. A Gestapo would be inconceivable in England; why should the German nation, accustomed to submission and amenable to discipline though it is, have endured its methods and its cruelties if it did not itself accept such methods as natural, and consequently regard them with an indifference almost amounting to tolerance, if not approval?

The Gestapo will pass away in time; but what, having regard to the future, saddened me still more, as well as filled me with apprehension, was the education of the German youth. I am no educational expert, but roughly the education of the average German boy proceeds along the following course: At six he goes to the elementary, or day school and at seven he joins the Jungvolk, or junior branch of the Hitler Jugend (Youth). Much of the training in the Jungvolk corresponds to that of our boy scouts, but he also gets there political lectures on National-Socialist lines (i.e. on the doctrines of racial superiority and national self-sufficiency) as well as training in target shooting. The musket is, in fact, put on his shoulder at the age of seven. At the age of fourteen and until eighteen it is compulsory for boys to join the Hitler Jugend itself, in which this politico-military education is intensified. At eighteen he does his six months’ labor service, and between the ages of eighteen and twenty (i.e. after his labor service) he does his two years’ military service. Only after the latter does he go to the university and while there is obliged to belong to the National-Socialist student organization. There are, of course, various arrangements for specialized training which need not be mentioned here, since I am restricting myself to the life of the average German boy. Whatever his subsequent occupation in life and if he is not already in permanent military employment, he then joins one of the para-military formations such as the S.S. or the S.A.

The S.A. (Sturmabteilung, or storm detachment) was the brownshirted army, which had won Hitler’s struggle for power for him and made him Chancellor and Führer of Germany. Captain Roehm had been its leader until, suspecting him of intriguing to seize supreme power for himself, Hitler had had him murdered in the “blood bath” of June, 1934. Thereafter the brown army, between three and four million strong, fell from grace and was reduced to a kind of party militia. Its position was taken by the blackshirted S.S. (Schutzstaffel, or protection squad) who formed Hitler’s special Praetorian Guard. The latter, much smaller in numbers than the S.A. (some hundreds of thousands instead of millions), were a select body of younger, picked, and highly trained men. Part of them constituted Hitler’s personal bodyguard, or household troops; some were later formed into military divisions, at least as well equipped as the Regular Army, but outside the command of the General Staff; and others were members of the Gestapo, or secret police. I refer to the S.S. sometimes in this narrative as “Blackshirts” but they might equally well have been called “Black Guards” written either as one word or two. There was considerable ill feeling between them and the brownshirts, whose favor with Hitler they had usurped and whom they treated with no little contempt. What the Regular Army thought of the S.S. I do not know. But they were a very essential part of the Nazi party stranglehold on the mass of the German people; and their chief was Heinrich Himmler, with the notorious Heydrich as his second-in-command. They constituted an essential ingredient of Hitler’s internal technique of “divide and rule.” It suited him to be surrounded by jealousies, with himself as sole arbiter of the quarrels of his followers. He could always play one off against the other, individually or corporately, and so rule all.

As a member of either S.S. or S.A. every German male is liable to be called up at any moment for special military service or any other duty and undergoes, till he is well past the age of fifty, refresher or other courses. That is what I mean later in this record when I describe Germany, on my arrival at Berlin, as being militarized from the cradle to the grave.

But even worse than this dangerous infusion of militaristic spirit, which has at least the redeeming virtues of discipline and obedience, so undeniably salutary to the young, is the politico-ideological poison which has no redeeming feature and with which the youth of the nation is being infected at its most malleable and impressionable stage. It is taught by means of a suppression of all real freedom and independence of thoughts, unparalleled in the history of the civilized world. “Brute force” as Hitler writes in Mein Kampf “can alone insure the survival of the race,” and the educational values of Germany today are rated in the following order:

1.

Race, i.e. the superiority of the Germanic, with its mission to dominate the world.

2.

Character, i.e. political reliability in strict accordance with Nazi doctrines.

3.

Body, i.e. physical fitness.

4.

Knowledge.

Along these few rigidly prescribed lines the mind of German youth since 1933 has been and is being intensively trained, and the reflection was one which made me wonder whether in Germany’s own, as well as Europe’s ultimate interests, it were not better that war should have come after six years of it rather than after perhaps twenty-six. Even so, maybe it will take a whole generation to eradicate the evil which has been wrought in this respect by Hitler, himself childless.

No dictator can ever feel that his position is permanently assured; and, apart from his army, it was on the Hitler Youth, his policemen, and his old revolutionaries that Hitler counted to keep himself in power. If he went, the last two categories would fall with him; they owed everything to him, and they could be relied upon to commit every crime in the calendar to insure that he did not fall. But, however deplorable these aspects of Nazism might be, internal oppression, which was the German nation’s own affair, was distinct for me from external aggression, which was a British concern; and, when I first went to Berlin, I felt that it was unjust and impolitic finally to condemn a whole system because of certain of its more obvious vices. Moreover, I believed that there was no real prospect of stability either in Germany or in Europe generally until the grievances arising out of the Versailles Treaty—which had created Hitler—had been rectified so far as the Germans were concerned. This done, I trusted that Hitler and the reasons for his existence and the methods of his regime would disappear. But in the meantime I thought that the right policy was to carry conciliation to its utmost point before abandoning hope of agreement. That has always been the traditional policy of England; and, if Hitler had had better advisers, he would have realized that its basis was strength and moral justice and not national decadence and weakness, which Ribbentrop persuaded him to believe that it was. Therefore, I was resolved to err, if anything, on the side of impartiality, to try to see the good side of the Nazi regime, if there was one, and to believe in Hitler’s word until he proved himself by his deeds to be a perjurer and a breaker of faith. The patient was abnormal, and I did not believe in continuing the treatment which had produced the disease. Peace was my big objective, and my influence with the Germans would be nil if I prejudged the Nazis from the start. In a sense my role, as I saw it, was to be the reverse of that of Balaam. I did not go to Berlin to curse, but, where possible, to bless. That was the background of my beginnings.