Page 62 - Was Hitler a Riddle?

The British Diplomats 49

most violent gesture is a smart slap of the clenched right hand into the open
palm of the left.” smallbones could not help conjecturing “that these out-
ward manifestations denote a spiritual change and that the man of ‘Mein
Kampf’ has become the convinced advocate of an era of peace for at least
twenty-five years.” it is difficult to account for this curious and unconvinc-
87
ing portrait of Hitler by a seasoned diplomat who had spent some fifteen
years in Germany. Perhaps smallbones’s change of mind should be viewed
as a preview to the shift in governing circles in Great Britain to outright
appeasement, the subject of the next section of this chapter.
Be that as it may, Phipps, who was to leave Berlin in the late spring
of 1937 for Paris, which had been his first choice in 1933, did not share
smallbones’s conversion. By this time, Phipps’s views, as well as his caustic
remarks about Göring, had somehow become known to several political
leaders, and as a result his relations with them had deteriorated to such an
extent that his departure from Germany was virtually inevitable. 88
in one of his last dispatches from Berlin, dated april 13, 1937, he reiter-
ated many of the points he had made throughout his residence in Ger-
many. He placed his arguments within the framework of a broad analysis of
Germany’s goals and capabilities. the dispatch is reminiscent of rumbold’s
“Mein Kampf dispatch” in that it sought to paint a comprehensive picture
of Germany’s present situation. it was not as elegant and penetrating as the
analysis of his predecessor, but it revealed a solid understanding of Nazism
and deserved careful attention in london.
as was his practice, Phipps acknowledged that his conclusions about
Germany’s warlike intentions might be mistaken. the country might avoid
military adventures “in the near future,” and it was conceivable that de-
spite the “vulgar demonstrations of hostility” that frequently appeared in
the press, the Nazi leaders, “without friends to encourage them, as austria
did in 1914, . . . may, i do not say they will, refrain from the final gamble
of war.” the rest of the eight-page dispatch, however, carried quite a dif-
89
ferent message. Phipps now accepted the argument that italy’s success in
its war against abyssinia in 1936 and the failure of the league of Nations
to intervene to stop the aggression inevitably gave confidence to the war-
mongers in a country where “might is worshipped. . . . the German began
to ask himself whether it was necessary to conciliate a Power [Great Brit-
ain] without whose favors italy seemed to be doing very well.” Britain’s
weakness encouraged average Germans to question the necessity for their
country to pursue an anglo-German understanding. some Nazi extrem-
ists had also concluded that Great Britain was so weak that it was pointless