Page 41 - Was Hitler a Riddle?

28 The British Diplomats

sent the long dispatch to london. the interview lasted only one hour, but
time enough for the ambassador to size up the man’s character. Both men
were frank, but they nevertheless parted, in the ambassador’s words, “on
perfectly good terms.” Baron Neurath, the German foreign minister from
1933 to 1938, attended the meeting but kept quiet or said very little, his cus-
tomary behavior in Hitler’s presence.
the Führer made several dubious claims, and rumbold duly noted them
without comment, which he no doubt considered unnecessary since they
were so far-fetched. Hitler insisted that the recent revolution in Germany
that had brought him to power was unique because it had been accom-
plished with a “minimum of violence and bloodshed. He maintained that
not even a pane of glass had been broken,” a blatant falsity since it was well
known that before and after the Nazis joined the government a consider-
able amount of street violence had broken out in Berlin and many other
localities. to drive home his point and to put the British ambassador on the
defensive, Hitler declared that in 1921 there had been much more violence
in ireland. so far, Hitler had remained calm, but when rumbold brought
up the treatment of the Jews, the Führer, as was his wont whenever this
subject was raised, worked himself “into a state of great excitement: ‘i will
never agree,’ he shouted as if he were addressing an open-air meeting, ‘to
the existence of two kinds of law for German nationals. there is an im-
mense amount of unemployment in Germany, and i have, for instance, to
turn away youths of pure German stock from the high schools. there are
not enough posts for pure-bred Germans, and the Jews must suffer with
the rest. if the Jews engineer a boycott from abroad, i will take care that
this hits the Jews in Germany.’ these were remarks delivered with great
ferocity.” in fact, Hitler was so agitated that rumbold forbore from making
a point he had carefully prepared ahead of the interview, that Hitler had
introduced “two standards of treatment of German nationals, inasmuch as
those of Jewish race were being discriminated against.” 30
rumbold dwelled on the Jewish question in this dispatch and elsewhere
not only because he considered the persecution of the Jews deplorable, but
also because many people refused to believe—as some do even today—that
racism was a cornerstone of his political creed. Hitler’s prejudices seemed to
be too outlandish. Moreover, rumbold wanted to stress that the anti-Jew-
ish policies were Hitler’s personal responsibility, not that of “wilder men”
in the party whom Hitler could not control. “anybody who has had the
opportunity,” the ambassador continued, “of listening to his remarks on
the subject of the Jews could not have failed, like myself, to realize that he