Page 220 - Was Hitler a Riddle?

Conclusion 207

evidence of his mental competence.” He “knew what he was doing and he
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chose to do it with pride and enthusiasm.” Hitler’s crimes and errors were
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not caused by illness, and he bears full responsibility for his actions.
in any case, the warnings of great danger to europe frequently issued
by foreign diplomats did not depend only on assessments of Hitler’s per-
sonality. time and again, British and French officials in Germany sent com-
prehensive reports to their governments on the country’s remilitarization.
they supplied their superiors in Paris and london with detailed accounts
on the number of troops in Hitler’s army and the sophisticated weapons
under production, and at various times they also reported highly secret in-
formation on the military plans of Hitler and his generals. the claim of
government leaders in the West that Hitler was a riddle and that it was
therefore impossible to devise a firm policy to restrain him hardly seems
credible. true, the diplomatic reports were not always consistent and the
diplomats were loath to make clear-cut policy recommendations, which, in
any case, was not their main function. too often they allowed themselves
to be deceived by signs of discontent within the Nazi Party or sharp differ-
ences within the leadership of the movement, which, they believed, could
signify a tendency toward the adoption of a more moderate course by the
Nazis. No doubt their single most serious mistake was to assume—as did
the French ambassador François-Poncet on several occasions—that Hitler
either was a moderate or would be swayed by moderates in the Nazi Party
to steer away from radical and provocative policies.
such speculation was unconvincing, all the more so since it contradicted
the diplomats’ descriptions of Hitler’s persona. as several envoys frequently
pointed out, Hitler was determined to root out the influence of Jews in
Germany’s economy and cultural affairs and to restore the country to a
dominant position in europe. He had formulated these ideas in the 1920s
in Mein Kampf and he never intended to deviate from them. One of the first
and greatest mistakes of the political class in the leading Western democra-
cies was to ignore Hitler’s outpourings in that book. they found it highly
improbable that anyone could really mean all the vile things he had written.
although theirs was a commendably civilized attitude, it failed to address
the troubling question why an aspiring political leader would utter such
extremist views if he did not take them seriously.
still, when all is said and done, the primary task of diplomats in Ger-
many was to provide their superiors with as full a picture as possible of
what Nazi rule signified, politically and militarily. that task they performed
with distinction, and the real riddle is not the one posed by Hankey in