Page 90 - Was Hitler a Riddle?

The British Diplomats 77

agreements had not slowed down British rearmament, on which he had
counted to enable Germany to achieve undisputed military supremacy in
europe. He was also annoyed at the West for continuing to criticize his
treatment of the Jews. Ogilvie singled out the speech made by Hitler on
January 31, 1939, which is now widely considered to have been a clear warn-
ing that he had in mind the most serious action against the Jews. “in at-
tacking the Jews bitterly on familiar grounds, Herr Hitler referred to the
shameful spectacle of the whole democratic world oozing sympathy for the
Jews, but hard-hearted when it came to practical help. in a passage which
met with loud applause he declared that if international financial Jewry
plunged the world into war, the result would be not bolshevism but the an-
nihilation of the Jewish race in europe.” 152 in Ogilvie’s view, it was impos-
sible not to despair about the near future even if one could not be certain
of Hitler’s next moves. But “what is certain is that the military and civilian
resources of the country are being prepared for an emergency.” 153
despite his pessimism, on one occasion, on January 3, 1939, Ogilvie sug-
gested that even if war broke out in europe, Britain might be able to avoid
entanglement in the conflict, and he urged his government to take the nec-
essary steps to that end. Britain must come to terms with the simple truth
that it was unable to guarantee the status quo in central and eastern europe
and that it should therefore make every effort to “cultivate good relations
with Field Marshal Göring and the moderate Nazis with a view to their
exercising a restraining influence on the extremists, such as ribbentrop,
Goebbels, and Himmler, who at the present have the ear of Hitler.” But in
the same dispatch to Halifax in which he expressed these opinions, Ogilvie
warned that Göring was so “devotedly loyal to his chief, that i see no indi-
cation whatever of his leading a movement against the Führer.” Moreover,
Göring supported the measures against the Jews, which hardly accords with
the depiction of him as a moderate. a substantial portion of this dispatch
154
clashes to such an extent with the views in the overwhelming majority of
Ogilvie’s reports from Berlin that one is hard put to know what to make of
it. Was he not thinking straight when he wrote it? Or was he engaging in
some appeasement of his own, not of Hitler but of ambassador Hender-
son, who was expected to return to his post when his medical treatment
was completed?
But if that was Ogilvie’s intention, he failed completely. On his return
to Berlin on February 13, 1939, Henderson lost no time in calling a meet-

elsewhere in the dispatch, Ogilvie referred to Goebbels as “that vile and dissolute dema-
gogue.”