Page 105 - Was Hitler a Riddle?

chapter two

The French Diplomats

in mid-december 1933, nearly eleven months after Hitler’s advent to power,
Maurice-Joseph-lucien saugon, the French consul-general in Hamburg,
received a long letter on the tense relations between Germany and France
from an “old German diplomat” who was deeply disturbed by political
trends in his own country. the “old German diplomat”—let us call him
X—deliberately ended his missive with an illegible signature, but saugon
recognized that the author was a thoughtful and well-educated man who
wrote a “very pure” German. X asked the consul-general to forward his let-
ter to higher authorities in Paris, who, he hoped, would find his views help-
ful in formulating policies toward Germany. as protocol required, saugon
also sent the letter to the French embassy in Berlin, so one can assume that
it crossed the desk of andré François-Poncet, widely regarded as the most
prominent and most influential of all the emissaries who served in Nazi
Germany.
X’s letter was long, insightful, prophetic, and very courageous. Had it
been intercepted by the police and traced to its author, X would surely have
been incarcerated in a concentration camp, if not shot immediately. But X
took those risks because he believed that it was his duty to warn the leaders
of France of impending dangers so that they would not be taken by surprise
by Germany’s diplomatic moves. in X’s view, the tense relations between
Germany and France constituted the principal source of conflict in europe,
but until the rise to power of National socialism it seemed possible that the
two countries would resolve their differences by negotiation. “this pros-
pect no longer exists,” he wrote.
X placed the blame for the new state of affairs squarely on the Nazi lead-