Page 147 - Was Hitler a Riddle?

134 The French Diplomats

been sympathetic to Nazism: he was accused of having helped Klaus Bar-
bie, a notoriously brutal Nazi official in France, escape to Bolivia. the
91
charge was never proven.

robert coulondre takes over
as ambassador

in late 1938, robert Coulondre, who had ably served as ambassador to
Moscow, replaced François-Poncet in Berlin. a civil servant with a long ca-
reer in the Foreign service, he has been praised as a “determined and clear-
headed diplomat.” in his memoirs, published in 1950, he claimed that in the
1930s he had clung tenaciously to a twofold strategy: Hitler must be reined
in, and for this approach to succeed the West must join forces with the
soviet Union. But the diplomatic documents published several decades
92
after the memoirs tell a somewhat different story. Coulondre’s perception
of National socialism was not strikingly different from that of his prede-
cessor, François-Poncet. this is hardly surprising, since Foreign Minister
Georges Bonnet was determined to avoid war and was therefore unlikely
to pick a person for the most important diplomatic post in the world who
held radically different views from his own. 93
that Coulondre was generally following in François-Poncet’s footsteps
became clear in the two dispatches he sent to Paris on his first meeting with
Hitler on November 22, 1938, only days after his arrival in Germany. Hitler,
the ambassador reported, made a “good impression” on him. the chancel-
lor spoke to him “with calm, with simplicity and with clarity; at no time
did i have the feeling that he was hiding his thoughts.” He did not become
animated until the end of the discussion, when he declared that he knew
the meaning of war and that “even a change in the frontier between the two
countries [that is, Germany and France] is not worth the sacrifices that it
would cause.” He declared, as he had so often, that he wanted good rela-
tions between Germany and France. Coulondre responded in an equally
friendly manner and stressed that the French government and people were
eager for rapprochement with Germany.
Coulondre offered an interesting, though unconvincing, interpretation
of Hitler’s conception of international relations. the Führer’s contention
that military action was not warranted to secure a change of frontiers meant
that he did not subscribe to the law of the jungle, which places no restric-
tions on human behavior. instead, Hitler was a proponent of the “law of