Page 96 - Was Hitler a Riddle?

The British Diplomats 83

with present-day realities,” whereas Britain was still living comfortably “in
a world of its own making, a make-believe land of strange, if respectable,
illusions.” the British subscribed to such “shibboleths” as “collective se-
curity,” “general settlement,” “disarmament,” and “non-aggression pacts,”
none of which made sense to Hitler and therefore could not provide him
with guidance in seeking to solve “europe’s difficulties.” instead of accept-
ing the “shibboleths,” Hitler preferred to deal with specific problems in
isolation. 167 Halifax expressed no opinion on Hitler’s approach to foreign
affairs, and his silence suggests that he either was not altogether unsympa-
thetic to it or did not quite know what to make of it.
By contrast, two other politicians who visited Hitler, lord lothian and
Prime Minister King, sent reports to the British government that amounted
to unqualified support for Chamberlain’s appeasement policy. anyone
reading them today cannot avoid being taken aback by the superficiality
and gullibility of the authors. to these two men, the Führer’s character did
not appear to be at all strange or puzzling. they were convinced that he was
a moderate statesman without any proclivities for violence, a leader con-
cerned only with restoring Germany’s position as a respected power. Hitler,
in short, seemed to them to be someone with whom it would be easy to
negotiate and to find solutions to outstanding problems. How they could
have reached conclusions so at odds with most of those we have examined
so far is in itself a riddle, which can perhaps be explained only by the cliché
that people often find what they wish to find. it is noteworthy, however,
that one of these apologists for appeasement soon completely changed his
mind and became a prominent supporter of the war effort against Ger-
many. the other, the Canadian prime minister, took longer to abandon ap-
peasement, but once war broke out, he supported Britain, more, it seems,
out of a sense of loyalty to the nation and Chamberlain than the conviction
that Nazism was a threat to the West.
King led a fascinating double life. On the one hand, he was an extraor-
dinarily efficient and somewhat ruthless politician who between 1921 and
1948 served as prime minister for a total of twenty-one years. in 1999, his-
torians ranked him as the greatest political leader in Canada’s history. But
his private life, which became known only after his death in 1950 when
the diary he had kept since 1893 was published, was rather idiosyncratic. it
turned out that he had regularly visited prostitutes and out of guilt tried
to rehabilitate them after having enjoyed their company. He ended his at-
tempts at rehabilitation in 1895 as a young man of twenty-one, but not the
visits. at the same time, King was a deeply religious person with a strong