12

A Berliner in Berlin

Four days later, on the morning of 27 June 1937, the British ambassador in Berlin, Sir Nevile Henderson, accompanied by an official of the Foreign Ministry, met Mackenzie King’s train from Paris at the Berliner Hauptbahnhof. Henderson, who had succeeded Sir Eric Phipps only six weeks before, at the end of April 1937, was a career diplomat who had spent his thirty-five-year career entirely abroad (including in Turkey at the time of Chanak), but as his obituary in the Times later stated, he was never in the first rank of British heads of mission. After only one year as ambassador to Argentina, he had been promoted ambassador to Germany.* Why he should have been chosen for Berlin over more capable colleagues is nowhere explicit.† The Nazis had clearly expressed their dislike of Phipps (a sentiment warmly reciprocated), but the hand of Chamberlain, the prime minister designate, was everywhere seen in Henderson’s unexpected appointment. Felix Gilbert, in The Diplomats, 1919–1939, says that Henderson’s selection “had certainly been influenced by the fact that he was clearly untinged by anti-German or pro-French bias.” Before his departure from London for Berlin, “he had had a long talk with Chamberlain, who explained the principles of his new policy. From that time on, Henderson considered himself less as a subordinate of the Foreign Office than as a personal agent of the Prime Minister, whose policy he was charged to carry out. Thus, he remained in constant touch with Sir Horace Wilson [Chamberlain’s personal éminence grise, whose primary experience was the private sector] and directed appeals to him whenever he disapproved of the instructions which he received from the Foreign Office.”1 During the month of April, while he was still in London, Henderson later recalled, Baldwin and Chamberlain (chancellor of the exchequer) “agreed that I should do my utmost to work with Hitler and the Nazi party as the existing government in Germany … Mr Chamberlain outlined to me his views on general policy toward Germany … I followed the general line which he set me, all the more easily and faithfully since it corresponded so closely with my private conception.”²* Given their backgrounds in industry, Chamberlain and Horace Wilson shared the illusion that the “same arts of round-table negotiation which served with English employers and trade unionists would also serve with Adolf Hitler,”³ a sentiment King shared.

Henderson’s two predecessors in Berlin, Rumbold and Phipps, could not have disagreed more. Rumbold, who had informed London five months after Hitler became chancellor that “Many of us here feel as if we were living in a lunatic asylum,” added with typical Foreign Office understatement, “the persons directing the policies of the Hitler Government are not normal.” In his farewell despatch in mid-1933 upon his retirement, he further forecast that “the outlook for Europe is far from peaceful … It would be misleading to base any hopes on a return to sanity or serious modification of the views of the [new] Chancellor and his entourage.”⁴ It took no time for Phipps, Rumbold’s successor in Berlin, to conclude that Hitler (whose fulminations he had observed in Austria during his previous appointment as minister in Vienna) was a psychopathic gangster and Göring a baboon. Josef Goebbels, the propaganda chief for the Reich, was “a vulgar, unscrupulous, irresponsible demagogue … and Hermann Göring a ruthless adventurer, reported to be a drug addict … vain and ambitious … a public danger.”⁵ Shortly after his arrival in Berlin, Phipps wrote to his receptive brother-in-law, Sir Robert Vansittart, the permanent undersecretary at the Foreign Office, that Hitler was “violent, arrogant, fanatical … his actual language bodes ill for such of his unfortunate countrymen who venture to differ from him.”6 Vansittart shared with Phipps, basing himself in part on M16 reports, his conviction that “The present regime in Germany will loose off another European war just so soon as it feels strong enough … We are considering very crude people who have few ideas … but brute force and militarism.”⁷

King heard none of that from Nevile Henderson, the antithesis of Rumbold, Phipps, and Vansittart. Henderson believed that his appointment “could only mean that I had been specially selected by Providence with the definite mission of … helping to preserve the peace of the world,”⁸ a belief that, unbeknownst to him, he shared with the prime minister of Canada, who regarded his own visit to Hitler as divinely ordained.* Henderson was convinced that he had been sent to Berlin “to do my utmost to work with Hitler and the Nazi Party as the existing government … any public attempt to co-operate with the Nazi Government would constitute somewhat of an innovation [after Rumbold and Phipps].”⁹ He capped this declaration of independence with an extraordinary salute to the two dictators in his later apologia, Failure of a Mission. “One cannot, just because he is a dictator, refuse to admit the great services which Signor Mussolini has rendered to Italy; nor would the world have failed to acclaim Hitler as a great German if he had known when and where to stop.”¹⁰ Others, however, came to view Henderson’s term as British ambassador as a disaster. Eden concluded, “It was an international misfortune that we should have been represented in Berlin … by a man who, so far from warning the Nazis, was constantly making excuses for them.”¹¹ Others went even farther. Vansittart “says that Henderson is a complete Nazi and that the Foreign Office do not trust him to represent their real point of view … Henderson is stupid and vain and has become almost hysterical in the Berlin atmosphere.”¹²

King’s first of his three days in Berlin began with visits to camps for girl and boys and then to the cavernous, swastika-festooned Sportpalast to see something of an All-German Sports Competition. To his gratification, he was given the seat that Hitler himself had occupied at the Olympic Games the year before. That was the high point of his first day, which ended with a brief viewing of the house at 70 Kaiserin Augusta Strasse near the Tiergarten where at the age of twenty-five he had lived for two months in 1900 with Professor Anton Weber, his wife, and two daughters.

That evening King had a long meeting with Henderson. He had declined the ambassador’s invitation to stay at the British residence rather than at the Hotel Adlon, still asserting that “there was always the danger of the Dominions feeling that they were being drawn into an Empire centralization scheme.” For the same reason, he also declined Henderson’s offer to accompany him to his meeting with Hitler. Despite having on two successive years sought approbation in London for his visit to Germany, King told Henderson that he did not want to be seen publicly as “under the wing of the British Government [or it to be thought] that Canada could not stand on her own feet in relation to Germany.” Henderson gave King a tour d’horizon of Anglo-German relations, concluding that Germany “could not be expected indefinitely to keep aloof from countries which were populated largely by Germans.” As he consistently urged upon the Foreign Office, “Austria was largely German. He could not see how [Hitler] could rightly prevent that union if the Austrians wished it … If the Germans [in Czechoslovakia] wished union with Germany … he thought that was something to be permitted. He believed Germany had her problems, her needs for expansion in Europe, and that if Britain tried to prevent this, it would be a great mistake.” To King’s satisfaction, Henderson spoke of the League of Nations “as a horror, and as a terrible institution; ‘collective security’ as something that was worse than meaningless, a real danger.” He also recorded with pleasure that Henderson’s understanding of Chamberlain “was much the same as myself; he thought Chamberlain had a better grasp of foreign policy than Baldwin had, and, in some ways, was stronger than Eden.”13

The arch-appeaser Henderson made a highly favourable impression on King, reassuring him in his positive views of Nazi Germany, but King made no impression on Henderson. King’s visit to Hitler goes unrecorded in his apologia Failure of a Mission, other than a passing reference to a luncheon he gave in honour of an unnamed visiting Canadian prime minister, but then only as a hook on which to record an unflattering anecdote about the contrasting taille of Marshal and Madame Göring. More specifically, Henderson records no notice of King’s statement to him that “he must not judge … that we [in Canada] would be indifferent to acts of aggression which might threaten the liberty, the freedom which we enjoy as members of the British Empire; that we had gone into the last war not because we had to, but purely voluntarily … and that natural feeling would express itself if there was aggression on the part of Germany.”14 King, in so speaking to Henderson, was telling him something that he had not yet confirmed with his cabinet colleagues or with his undersecretary of state for external affairs. Henderson appears to have disregarded King’s statement as a mere platitude and seems not to have reported it to London.

Before his mid-day meeting with Hitler on 29 June, King met with Göring for an hour and a half at his grandiose office. On leaving the Hotel Adlon, King mulled over various Old and New Testament passages, sensing “the presence of God in all this, [my] guardian at every step … the day for which I was born … May God’s blessing rest upon this day and the nations of the world – and His peace be theirs.” Göring greeted him with thanks for a gift of Canadian bison to the Berlin Zoo.* “I said we were only too pleased to be able to supply some of these animals and would gladly let him have more at any time … To get under way with friendly feeling, I spoke to him of being born in Berlin [Ontario].” When Göring, after briefly touching on the prospects for increased trade between Canada and Germany, asked King whether it was necessary in dealing with the dominions to go through London (as noted above, only South Africa and the Irish Free State had legations in Berlin), King referred to the visit the year before of the trade mission led by William Euler, his minister of trade and commerce, as evidence that Canada and Germany could deal directly with each other. This set him off on his favourite paradox: “It was the freedom we all enjoyed which kept the British Empire together. Every step we had taken toward independence and self-expression had really brought us closer together than would have been the case had there been any attempt at control or compulsion on the part of Britain.” Having assured Göring that he was all for peace, he invited him to visit Canada. The Reichsmarschall readily accepted the invitation in principle, noting that Canada was the first country to invite him. He specified that he would go for “the big game,” elk and bear, but he did not want to go anywhere near the United States. King replied that “we would be glad to see the necessary arrangements made.” King repeated the favourable comment about Henderson made to him by King George VI, to which he added that he had himself found the ambassador well suited for his new post. But the burden of King’s conversation with Göring was about the many merits of the new British prime minister, the peace-loving Neville Chamberlain, who stood for non-intervention in the internal affairs of other countries. Göring replied that he was pleased to hear it.15

Having mused on the cloud of witnesses from Berlin, Ontario, who were sanctioning with their unseen presence his visit to the original Berlin, King arrived for his mid-day conversation with Hitler convinced that it was an important diplomatic initiative. But in the words of Neatby, one of King’s biographers, the visit “was for Hitler probably no more than a brief audience with a minor visiting dignitary.”¹⁶ Perhaps not even that, it being likely that Hitler, in his Weltanschauung, regarded Canada as little more than an ill-defined appendage of Britain. Accordingly, if Hitler had anything new to say about how he saw the world, it would not be to a prime minister of Canada. In the event, Hitler said nothing new, but he did it in “a friendly manner … Hitler did not appear to be the least excited in anything he said … He spoke with great calmness, moderation and logically, and in a convincing manner.” Addressing King through his “exceedingly effective” interpreter Schmidt, Hitler described yet again the many injustices of the Treaty of Versailles and the looming threat of Soviet communism. But to King’s satisfaction, he also emphasized the peaceful intentions of Germany, a country fully familiar with the horrors of modern warfare. As a result, King described the Führer in his diary as “an intense nationalist, resentful of the wrongs against Germany, but not a reckless or resentful man who would heedlessly provoke a war with Britain.” In short, “he is really one who truly loves his fellow men.”17

King began by volunteering to Hitler that the British foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, had endorsed his visit. Presumably in conveying this British approval to Hitler, King sought to establish his bona fides that he was speaking for the British Empire, notwithstanding his long-standing and public opposition to an imperial foreign policy and his incongruous statement to Hitler that his visit was “purely a personal one.” He explained that “what Canada valued above everything else as one of the Nations of the British Commonwealth was the freedom which we all enjoyed … secured by our free association together and common allegiance to the common crown.” By including this in his later memorandum to Chamberlain and Eden and not in his diary, he was underlining for them how committed he was to supporting British foreign policy. Also via his later memorandum, King reported that he had attempted to instruct Hitler on the finer points of the Canadian constitution (as he had done with Mussolini a decade earlier). He was unaccompanied by the British ambassador, he explained, because “Some foreign countries [or even some Canadians] might think that this was evidence of some tendency towards separation between Canada and Britain … it was evidence of something quite to the contrary … had the British ambassador accompanied me, they would have had in Canada a feeling of subordination as far as our Dominion was concerned. It was the fact that we were all so completely free to settle our own policies that would cause us at all costs to maintain the unity which we enjoyed in the Commonwealth of Nations.”

King then elaborated a reference to defence expenditures. He told Hitler that increased expenditures were “occasioned by what was taking place in Germany in the way of increased outlays for war purposes.” He had added, he said, that “if the time ever came when any part of the Empire felt that the freedom which we all enjoyed was being impacted through any act of aggression on the part of a foreign country, it would be seen that all would join together to protect the freedom which we were determined should not be imperilled.” Seeing himself as speaking for the whole British Common-wealth, King described how he had assured Hitler that “there was no thought of aggression in the mind of any member.” It was the “sense of freedom and security which we enjoyed in our British institution which was the real element of the Empire.”

Hitler, in turn, said that all of Germany’s difficulties grew out of the “enmity” of the Treaty of Versailles, which had imposed “indefinite subjection” on the German people. The complete disarmament of Germany had necessitated rapid rearmament “to defend herself” and to reclaim a position “where we will be respected.” The choice was plain. “We were either to be held in permanent subjugation or to take a step which would preserve us in our own rights.” In his diary account, King readily accepted this explanation, but was even more gratified by Hitler’s flat statement that there would be no war as far as Germany was concerned: “My support comes from the people and the people don’t want war,” King adding that “this impressed me very much as a real note of humility.”18 In his memorandum to Chamberlain and Eden, he also records Hitler as stating that “nothing that can be said to me will ever cause me to commit Germany to go to war with regard to some situation that might arise in the future … I am not like Stalin. I cannot shoot my Generals and Ministers when they will not do my will. I am dependent for any power on the people who are behind me. Without the people I am nothing.”¹⁹

In his memorandum but not his diary, King at this point included a statement by the Führer about the British ambassador: “Herr Hitler said that Sir Nevile Henderson had not been in Germany very long, but they all liked him and felt that he had a good understanding of German problems.”²⁰ Hitler concluded his conversation with King (who was gratified that it had lasted more than an hour instead of the mere thirty minutes scheduled) with an invitation to six students and undesignated “officers” to spend three weeks in Germany to see what had been accomplished since he had become chancellor five years before. For whatever reasons, King did not refer to this invitation in his later memorandum to Chamberlain and Eden, although Hitler repeated it two years later (on 21 July 1939, the result of prompting by King’s friend, the German consul general in Ottawa).²¹ King was careful to convey in his memorandum his belief in Hitler as a fellow mystic at the head of what had rapidly become again one of the most powerful countries in the world. In his diary, King described Hitler as a mystic who had told him “in a most positive emphatic way that there would be no war so far as Germany was concerned.” Hitler’s face was “not that of a fiery, over-strained nature, but of a calm, passive man, deeply and thoughtfully in earnest … As I talked with him, I could not but think of Joan of Arc.”* He added to Chamberlain that the Führer impressed him as “a man of deep sincerity and a genuine patriot.”²²

The following morning, King had his second meeting with Göring, tea with Rudolf Hess, and an hour with Foreign Minister Konstantin von Neurath. King told Chamberlain and Eden but not his diary that, during his second conversation with Göring, he went a good deal farther in indicating that Germany might expect to find “all parts of the British Empire” firmly united “in the event of the unity of the whole being threatened by any act on Germany’s part.” He was less categorical in response to a specific question from Göring about whether Canada would support Britain in the event of the “Germans of Germany and Austria wishing to become one people; would Canada go to the length of supporting Britain if she tried to prevent a step of the kind?” King replied rather lamely, “We would wish to take all circumstances into account and judge the question on its merits.”²³

King’s meeting with Hess went unrecorded, despite the fact that King could have known from the Security Branch of the RCMP (who had it from the British) that Hess had long been urging the organization of a pro-Nazi Bund movement in North America and the supply of Nazi propaganda to it. Neurath, who had been ambassador in London from 1930 to 1932, assured King that as “long as he was at the Foreign Office, there would never be [a] possibility of war between Germany and England.” King added with satisfaction that “the Baron von Neurath had a very great personal admiration for Mr Chamberlain … and a strong belief in his desire and ability to find the solution of the problems existing between England and Germany.”24 King’s programme ended with a night at the opera where, again to his gratification, he sat in the seat reserved for Hitler, which prompted him to acknowledge Hitler as a great music lover.

King summed up to his diary on 30 June 1937 – the night he left Berlin – his delight about it all: “It was as enjoyable, informative and inspiring as any visit that I have ever had anywhere.” Even more importantly, he had discovered that Canadians were more like Germans than anyone else: “The German people seemed to me much easier to understand, and more like ourselves than either the French or the English.” And everything in Nazi Germany, even the racial hatreds and political violence, was explicable: “the hatreds … are mainly those which arise from position and privilege … one does not like regimentation, but it is apparently the one way to make views prevail … I have come away from Germany tremendously relieved. I believe there will not be war.”²⁵

Unfortunately, there is extant no German record or commentary on King’s visit. There is, however, a brief and indirect record of his talks with Göring left by the British air attaché in Berlin. Göring had been a brave fighter pilot in the First World War and in his admiration for the courage of the British air attaché he often chatted with him candidly. On 28 July, four weeks after King’s departure, Göring told Group Captain M.G. Christie that he was pleased by the understanding attitude of some – unnamed – dominion premiers toward German ambitions in central Europe, a region in which they had declared no interest. More specifically, Göring told Christie that he had had a good talk with the Canadian prime minister Mackenzie King which “had pleased him much. Christie retorted that Mackenzie King was the last man qualified to speak for the Canadian people in any question of the Dominions’ backing the mother country’s policy of opposition to aggression; during the first [world] war, after all, King had spent his time in complete safety in the USA, and the fact that he had not volunteered for service with Canadian troops abroad had been a subject of much criticism among Canadian voters.”26

Although Göring thought the prospects for Anglo-German relations were rather better than he had previously imagined, he made no secret from Christie that Germany wanted to take Austria, Bohemia, and Moravia. In his conversation with Göring, King had in fact said that Canada was determined to preserve the freedom that membership of the Empire conferred and if at any time it felt this freedom imperilled by an aggressive act toward Britain “our people would almost certainly respond immediately to protect our common freedom.” Göring asked whether Canada would necessarily follow Britain in everything; for example, if Germany and Austria wished to unite, would Canada support Britain in trying to prevent it? King gave the predictable and inevitable reply, Canada would wish to examine all the circumstances before coming to a decision. “I do not wish you to think,” Göring hastily replied, “that there is going to be any attempt to take possession of Austria, but I am speaking of a development which might come in time.”²⁷

To return to King’s diary, he noted that he left Berlin at 2122 on 30 June on the night train to Brussels where he arrived at 0815 on 1 July in time for an early audience with the king of the Belgians with whom he shared his good impressions of Hitler. He also sent a prompt thank-you letter “from his heart” to the Führer for the great privilege of meeting him, emphasizing that “you … can do more than any man living to-day to help keep your own and other countries along the path to peace and progress.” He added that Hitler’s gift of a silver-framed photograph of himself “is a gift of which I am very proud, and of the friendship of which it is so generous an expression, I shall ever cherish. May I again thank you for it and for all that it will always mean to me.”²⁸

King also recorded that he arrived in Paris by train on the same evening in time to speak with remarkable public candour the next day at the Canadian pavilion at the Paris exposition (where the largest national pavilion was the bombastic German, and the prize-winning film was Leni Riefenstahl’s adulatory Triumph of the Will). As Malcolm MacDonald informed his cabinet colleagues, King declared there that “the British Commonwealth prized its great liberty and freedom: If the United Kingdom were imperilled from any source whatever … [the result would be to] bring us together again in preservation of it.”29 Free from the presence of Skelton, King saw himself as able to make such public commitments not only for Canada but for the whole British Commonwealth, much to his deputy minister’s subsequent consternation.

King continued his dialogue with Walter Riddell by inviting him to come to Paris from Geneva to discuss League of Nations and European affairs, discussions that would be welcomed by whomever remained of pro-League Canadians. He described his visit the week before to Hitler. To Riddell’s surprise, “Mr King then seemed quite satisfied that Hitler was being misunderstood and that he did not constitute any danger to peace.” When Riddell suggested to the contrary that Hitler’s aggressive policies were bound to bring him into conflict with the United Kingdom and France, King recalled Hitler’s own words during their meeting in which he had assured him that “he had no intention of making war.”³⁰*

Before embarking on the Canadian Pacific Railway’s (CPR) new flagship Empress of Britain from Cherbourg on 3 July, King sent telegrams of thanks to Henderson and Ribbentrop. Henderson replied immediately that “I still believe that the people who fought in that war [the Great War] don’t want war again … and that in consequence it will be avoided … I am grateful to you for the encouragement no less than the help you gave me. You put heart into me and I look back on our talks with great appreciation and sympathy.”³¹ In London before sailing for Montreal, King found awaiting him a letter from his University of Toronto classmate, Viscount Greenwood. “You must have had a most interesting time … in your visit to Hitler. I am sure that the prime minster here [Chamberlain] would be very glad if you would send him your impressions.”³² Within a fortnight, King had done so. With his memorandum of 6 July, addressed to both Chamberlain and Eden, King in effect left two accounts of his visit. The first is his diary account, compiled the same or on the following day. The second is a fourteen-page memorandum (and a two-page covering letter) that he dictated on 6 July for Chamberlain and Eden before sailing for Canada.³³ King’s diary account, not surprisingly, has an air of spontaneity that the later and more formal memorandum lacks. The sequence of his conversation with Hitler also differs and even some of the content varies substantially between the two accounts, but perhaps the most striking differences are the way in which he describes in the memorandum to Chamberlain and Eden his firm statement to Hitler about how unified the reaction of the British Commonwealth to German aggression would be and, second, the degree to which he extolled Chamberlain and Henderson as great advocates of peace between Germany and Britain, in whom Hitler could have every confidence.

A month after his arrival back in Ottawa on 11 July, King received from Chamberlain a five-page reply dated 28 July to his memorandum of 6 July. Given that there was only surface mail service (including for the British diplomatic bag that would have carried Chamberlain’s letter), it could not have reached King before mid-August, six weeks after his visit to Berlin.* King was thus able to draw on its thinking before and following Chamberlain’s three appeasement visits to Hitler in October. Chamberlain was profuse in his gratitude for King’s account and the “very kind words” that he had said to Hitler about himself, but more important, he acknowledged King’s commitment to the British Commonwealth by quoting back to him his words that all the countries of the Commonwealth would be alongside Britain if war were to come. Eden, in light of Chamberlain’s five-page letter, sent hardly more than a paragraph recognizing Chamberlain’s reply and contenting himself with the assurance that the Foreign Office had found his memorandum of “great use.”³⁴

In a rare CBC broadcast of 19 July 1937, King reported that “neither the government nor the peoples of any of the countries I have visited [Britain, France, Belgium, and Germany] desire war … as other than likely to end in self-destruction and the destruction of European civilisation itself.”³⁵† However, if war did come, King was privately convinced that it would be the fault of the international press, which in his mind now matched the League of Nations as the prime international villain. “Through its mis-representations and persistent propaganda, some incidents will arise which will occasion conflict. If that comes … it will be … because of the interests behind the press, not because it is the wish either of the Governments or of the peoples.” King’s ultimate conclusion about his visit with Hitler was remarkably self-serving; if Hitler held back, Mackenzie King’s visit to Germany and talk with Hitler, more than any single factor, would be responsible.36

In a thank-you letter to Göring of 28 July (following the telegram he had sent him from France), King reviewed in detail possible arrangements for him to travel by rail across Canada, including on the Kettle Valley line in the East Kootenay district of the CPR. He enclosed travel pamphlets and brochures, but also included the text of his CBC broadcast, in which had said that if war did come it would be the fault of the international press.³⁷ A fortnight later, King sent Ribbentrop a three-page handwritten letter of warmest thanks, asking him to tell Hitler, Göring, von Neurath, and Hess “how deeply touched I was … and how deeply gratified I have felt at the visit as a whole.”³⁸

At a small dinner party at Laurier House soon after his return to Ottawa in mid-July, King told the journalist Bruce Hutchinson that he had found Hitler “‘a simple sort of peasant’ and not very bright, who wished only to possess the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia. That insignificant prize would satisfy him and the theft of foreign property did not seem to distress King. No, he said, Hitler did not intend to risk war. And to those peaceful motives King undoubtedly felt that he had made his own valuable contribution.³⁹ Later, in October, the visiting British economist Lord Stamp recorded how King had given him “in full detail an account of his talk with Hitler … Apparently [he] talked with Hitler directly about the colonial demands which Hitler treated as not a matter of any consequence. Mackenzie King said that it might be difficult to stop the agitation if it grew very powerful and Hitler declared that he could always dampen it down at any moment when required” (this is the only known reference to any discussion between Hitler and King about the return of prewar colonies to Germany).⁴⁰ King had recorded none of this in his diary or in his memorandum to Chamberlain and Eden, but to the US chargé d’affaires in Ottawa on 23 July 1938, a year after his visit, he was still describing Hitler “as being … a very sincere man. He even described him as being ‘sweet’… he had the face … of a good man, although he was clearly a dreamer and gave the impression of having an artistic temperament.”⁴¹ What Roosevelt, Hull, or the State Department made of this is unrecorded, but when Chamberlain flew to Germany for the first of his three meetings with Hitler, King was convinced that he had played the key role in bringing them together. “My last words with Hitler were that he would like Chamberlain, that he could trust him, that he was a man he could deal with, that he was truly anxious to bring about better relations between Germany and Britain.”42* King was quite clear that he “was the first to give Hitler faith in Chamberlain, telling him that … Chamberlain could be relied upon to see what was fair and right was done.”⁴³

The Duke and Duchess of Windsor – at Germany’s expense – visited Hitler from 11 to 23 October 1937 (four months after King, a year after Lloyd George, and a fortnight after Mussolini’s visits in Munich and Berlin). With Ribbentrop dancing attendance, the duke and duchess inspected “workmen’s settlements” before meeting with the Führer and his leading colleagues. The duke, who had as Prince of Wales been “vociferous in his oft-expressed admiration for Nazi Germany,” repeated much of his earlier praise of the Nazi regime.⁴⁴ He recalled his controversial speech to the British Legion of the year before in which he had urged friendly relations between British and German ex-servicemen organizations. Some visionaries in Berlin continued to toy with the madcap idea that once Britain had been defeated, they would foster a movement in Britain to restore the duke to the throne, but details of the visit of the duke and duchess have not been released. The New York Times of 13 October did, however, report that the Duke had said in Berlin that “the British Ministers of to-day and their possible successors are no match for the German and Italian dictators.”

*On a German liner from Buenos Aires to Hamburg, when he was not reading Mein Kampf, Henderson shared his thoughts about what British policy toward Hitler’s Germany should be with Wilfrid Ashley, Lord Mount Temple, the president of the Anglo-German Fellowship. Lady Mount Temple was the only child of the Jewish financier Sir Ernest Cassel. Their two daughters were accordingly accounted half Jewish, yet Mount Temple did not resign the presidency of the Anglo-German Fellowship until November 1938, less than a year before the Second World War. His brother-in-law, Viscount Greenwood of Whitby, Ontario, was by contrast an anti-Nazi.

†Henderson himself later candidly acknowledged that he had doubted his fitness for a diplomatic career and that it had been a mistake to send him to Berlin.

*The degree to which Henderson acted as the creature of Chamberlain and not of the Foreign Office may be gauged by the following diary entry of 20 October 1938 by Sir Alexander Cadogan, the permanent undersecretary: Henderson on a visit to London “told me privately … that he had put Göring up to objecting to our guarantee of Czecho[slovakia].” Cadogan does not say whether in response he bothered to remonstrate with Henderson or even to caution him (Cadogan, Diaries, 122).

*The hand of Providence was felt by Hitler as well as by inter alia King, Henderson, and Halifax. At the time of the German reoccupation of the Rhineland in March 1936, Hitler declared that he went the way Providence dictated.

*Göring was an aficionado of big game hunting and zoos as well as of bison (according to some wits as a result of sharing a girth). On 11 June 1934, Göring invited the ambassadors of Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, and several ministers of the Nazi government to view his shooting box and other paraphernalia at his new rural bison enclosure. The British ambassador, Sir Eric Phipps, recorded, “On the conclusion of General Göring’s address, three or four cow bison were driven towards a large box containing a bull bison. A host of cinematograph operators and photographers aimed their machines at this box preparatory to the exit of the bull. Those who, like myself, have seen the mad charge of the Spanish bull out of his ‘torril’ looked forward to a similar sight on this occasion, but we were grievously disappointed for the bison emerged from his box with the utmost reluctance and, after eyeing the cows somewhat sadly, tried to return to it.” Tactfully, Phipps did not record whether the non-performing bull bison was Canadian (Our Man in Berlin, 56).

The Canadian and other bison and elk reappeared on the international diplomatic scene when in November 1937, four months after King’s visit to Berlin, Chamberlain sent Lord Halifax, then lord president of the council, to make direct contact with Hitler through Henderson, bypassing the increasingly troublesome foreign secretary, Anthony Eden. The ostensible reason for his visit, however, was to attend, as a former master of foxhounds, a gathering of the German Hunting Association which included among other gala events a visit to the hunting lodge and bison enclosure of Reichsjägermeister Göring.

The Canadian bison and other edible quadrupeds at the Berlin zoo came to a sorry end during the Second World War. Amid near starvation, they were slaughtered and eaten.

*Mackenzie King’s comparison of Hitler to Joan of Arc was not unique to him. George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan had played in Berlin and Vienna after its opening in London in 1924 where King, although not a frequent theatregoer, may at some time have seen it. Sir John Simon, the British foreign secretary, wrote to King George V on 27 March 1935 and to Sir Eric Phipps on 5 April 1935 that Hitler was Saint Joan with a moustache (Cowling, The Impact of Hitler, 442). According to Walter Riddell’s diary for 16 April 1935, Simon said to him over dinner in Geneva, following his return from Berlin, “as he watched [Hitler] hour after hour, he could not help thinking of him as a Joan of Arc.” Riddell duly wrote to King in September 1936 that Simon had told him that Hitler “seemed to consider himself a kind of Joan of Arc, as a great deliverer whose mission was to free his people.”

Shaw’s plays were much admired in their German-language versions from the opening of Pygmalion in Berlin in October 1913. Shaw was in turn an enthusiast of both Mussolini and Hitler, strong men who had “the personality to change the world,” and Oswald Mosley was “the only striking personality in British politics.” Shaw’s plays, including Saint Joan, which Hitler favoured, were presented across Germany in the 1930s. Goebbels attended the Berlin premiere of The Millionairess in 1936 and Hitler Caesar and Cleopatra in 1939. Karl Ludecke was not alone in seeing Hitler as the obvious model for Battler in Shaw’s bizarre 1939 anti-League of Nations play, Geneva.

Shaw asked a German friend (Ribbentrop was a frequent interlocutor) to tell Göring “that I have backed his regime in England to the point of making myself unpopular.” Beatrice Webb, however, found the attitude of her fellow socialist toward the dictators all nonsense. She asked him in early 1934 why he admired Mussolini and Hitler when they had “no philosophy, no notion of any kind of social organisation except their undisputed leadership instead of parliamentary self-government” (Holroyd, Shaw, 3: 113.)

*Lapointe wanted to dismiss Riddell from the diplomatic service, but King instead transferred him in 1937 to Washington as deputy head of mission and in 1940 to Wellington as Canada’s first high commissioner to New Zealand.

*The ambitious plan to create an imperial network of airships, endorsed by the 1926 imperial conference, had suddenly ended with the crash of a prototype in northern France in October 1930.

†Perhaps inspired by the popular success of the broadcasts of King George V and the “fireside chats” of Roosevelt, King embarked hesitantly on occasional CBC broadcasts prior to the Second World War.

*On 11 August 1944, at the height of the Second World War, King was even more expansive in the Canadian House of Commons about his statements of commitment to support Britain during his visit to Berlin seven years before. His visit, he now declared, “had as its objective to make it perfectly clear if there were a war of aggression, nothing in the world would keep the Canadian people from being at the side of Britain. That was known to the German Government at the time and my action was fully known to the British Government.”