Page 61 - Was Hitler a Riddle?

48 The British Diplomats

but in the end only one leader, Gregor strasser, “broke off from Hitler.” By
February 1934, Phipps rejected these analyses and insisted that a split was
highly unlikely. Hitler was so superior to his colleagues, and the devotion
to him of the “vast majority of the nation inside and outside the party” was
so pronounced, that no one could challenge his authority. a sizable sec-
tor of the working class was opposed to the new order, but “they are too
cowed to undertake anything against it.” Four months later, Phipps was
even more convinced that he was right. Hitler, he now pointed out, “was a
cunning man with streaks of genius. No other such has emerged in present-
day Germany.” Both major factions in the Nazi Party believed that he was
on their side, but Hitler had been careful not to identify fully with either
one of them. Most important of all, “for countless Germans he still stands
supreme on a lofty, lonely eminence. in his hands he holds their happiness,
and him they still worship like the God they now neglect.” since Phipps
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had stressed the Führer’s psychological instability in several dispatches from
Berlin, it is hard to believe that his change of heart after a few months in the
new post in Paris was based on a reasoned reevaluation of his critical views
of Nazism. His last major dispatch from Berlin, discussed below, certainly
contained nothing to suggest that he was reconsidering his position on
Hitlerism.
during the five years that rumbold and Phipps served as ambassadors in
Nazi Germany, remarkably little division of opinion could be found within
the British diplomatic corps in Berlin and other German cities with regard
to the new regime. some may have been more forceful than others in de-
ploring the policies of Hitler and his party, but the archives contained only
one dispatch that could be construed as taking a benign view of Hitler.
Curiously, it was written by Consul General smallbones in Frankfurt, the
same man who in 1920 had drafted a highly critical evaluation of National
socialism. in March 1937, he underwent a volte-face. it seems to have origi-
nated during his attendance at a speech by Hitler at the Festhalle in Frank-
furt. the speech did not break any new ground, but smallbones was im-
pressed by the change that “has come over” the Führer since he last saw him
some years earlier. “His bearing and his very features seem to have become
more refined and more gentlemanly. the truculence has gone from his eyes
and he smiles and nods benignly. His hands which used to look squat and
grasping have turned white and emaciated. He used to hold on to the table
before him with an iron grip but now the fingers hardly look for support
and they flutter gently in the air to explain, as it were, a point; gone is the
continual thumping of the table and, while the old fire has not left him, the