Page 91 - Was Hitler a Riddle?

78 The British Diplomats

ing of the embassy staff to rebuke them for having adopted a negative tone
in their dispatches. He informed the assembled group that henceforth all
dispatches would have to conform with the ambassador’s views. Five days
after his return to his post, Henderson wrote to london that “Herr Hitler
does not contemplate any adventures at the moment and . . . all stories and
rumours to the contrary are completely without foundation.” 155
three weeks later, on March 6, 1939, Henderson sent a huge dispatch to
Halifax clearly designed to counteract the reports sent to london during
his absence. Because of “unforeseen circumstances” he had been unable to
contribute to the annual report of the embassy and now felt it was “incum-
bent” on him to submit a “personal record of the events of the past year.”
Henderson was known for wordiness, but this time he outdid himself:
his account ran to twenty-four typewritten pages (about twenty thousand
words) and it contained some of his more bizarre opinions. He criticized
the newspapers in europe and america for being too eager to belittle and
humiliate Hitler and Nazi Germany. “if a free press is allowed to run riot
without guidance from higher authority,” he warned, “the damage which
it may do is unlimited. even war may be one of the consequences.” the
“upshot” of the press campaign in the West was to drive Hitler to side with
the extremists in the Nazi movement and to threaten force against Czecho-
slovakia should its government refuse to yield to his demands. similarly,
the press campaign also encouraged the Czech government to stiffen its
resistance to Germany’s demands. 156
Henderson had nothing but praise for the way Chamberlain had han-
dled the Czech crisis, and he was certain that Hitler was “undoubtedly
touched (his sentimentality is a characteristic which we have failed hitherto
to exploit), and i was given to understand that his first reaction was to
save the elder man [Chamberlain] fatigue of the journey by going himself
to london or at least half-way there. His second [reaction] was to invite
Mrs. Chamberlain to accompany her husband.” still, Henderson granted
that the “humiliation of the Czechs [in Munich] was a tragedy,” but they
had largely brought it onto themselves because they had refused to make
concessions. 157
in an epilogue to the dispatch, Henderson discussed the “November
pogrom of the Jews” (Kristallnacht), which he denounced as a reversion
“to the barbarism of the Middle ages” and a “disgusting exhibition” that
appalled many Germans. He explained the violence, which had followed
the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris, in two ways, one of them
quite fanciful. First, the pogrom gave the Nazis an opportunity to “plunder