Page 29 - Was Hitler a Riddle?

16 The British Diplomats

in many respects, rumbold was well prepared for the post in Berlin.
Born in 1869 in st. Petersburg to an upper-class family—his father was also
a diplomat, as were his ancestors for over three hundred years—Horace had
received a first-rate education at eton, and during his thirty-nine years in the
diplomatic corps he mastered seven foreign languages, including German,
and had some familiarity with German society and politics, having served
at the consulate in Munich in 1909 and at the embassy in Berlin in 1913 and
1914. rumbold was essentially a political conservative and shared many of
the prejudices of the German elite, but he was not a zealot. in Great Britain,
he maintained good relations with a number of labourites and frequently
engaged in friendly conversations with people he disagreed with. But, like
his father, Horace did not take kindly to people different from those in his
social circle. in 1904, he wrote his father that he did not want to meet a
friend of his stepbrother because “i hate Jews.” On his arrival in Berlin, he
was “quite happy” except for one drawback. “the only fly in the ointment,”
he wrote a friend, “is the number of Jews in the place. One cannot get away
from them,” a comment that illustrates the depth of his prejudice. although
Berlin counted more Jews than any other German city, they still made up
only 4 percent of the population. rumbold also did not like blacks, and
once told the conductor of a train he was taking that he would not “share
a compartment with a black gentleman.” He tipped the conductor “hand-
somely” to secure a “compartment to myself.” during his two years of service
in Madrid (1907–8) he developed a dislike for spaniards, who, he believed,
were “vain, full of pride, untruthful, dirty and inclined to idleness.” He also
disparaged Persians, Japanese, and the French. rumbold simply did not like
anyone who was not British as he defined the word. 1
rumbold’s attitude toward Germany and its citizens was mixed, al-
though his negative impressions far outweighed the positive ones. He
respected the Germans for their strength of character and resilience, but
also considered them to be a belligerent and fickle people solely responsible
for the outbreak of hostilities in 1914. in fact, he was convinced that Ger-
mans had a natural propensity for brutality, a trait he believed to be alien to
englishmen. Nevertheless, in the early 1930s he did not oppose German
2
expansion in the east to redress grievances generated by what were widely
regarded as the harsh conditions imposed by the treaty of Versailles. all in
3
all, the British government could not have chosen a better person for the
post of ambassador in Berlin. He was not viscerally hostile to Germany,
and in view of his age, the assignment to Germany was likely to be his last,
which would make it easier for him to voice his views candidly, without fear