Diplomacy
PARIS, FRANCE, on the evening of Monday, 31 July 1939. It had been a particularly fine summer in Paris. The street cafés and parks had been as busy as ever, and the usual Bastille Day military parade just a fortnight earlier had been especially splendid. Mounted cavalry, breastplates shining in the sun, troops from Africa, infantry in their finest bright uniforms, and huge new tanks and artillery pieces had all marched down the Champs-Élysées in a display of military might and confidence as befitted one of the leading and most powerful nations in the world.
At the austere Château de Vincennes in south-east Paris, the headquarters of the General Staff of the French Armed Forces, instructions for the forthcoming military talks with the Soviet Union had just arrived from their British counterparts. A printed document around an inch thick, it was a dossier that well reflected the unease both Britain and France were feeling about dealing with the Russians and, in particular, their Communist dictator, Joseph Stalin.
Talks with the Soviet Union had begun that April, with both Britain and France expressing their willingness for some kind of pact based on the old entente that had encircled Imperial Germany back in 1914. The trouble was, Russia was very different now. For Western democracies, Communism was as bad as Nazism, while Stalin’s purges of the past few years hardly encouraged trust. Foreign observers were stunned to learn, in the summer of 1937, that a large number of senior Red Army officers had been arrested and immediately executed, including Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, a brilliant man who had impressed the British during a visit in 1936. But Tukhachevsky was hardly alone. Three out of five marshals were executed, thirteen out of fifteen Army commanders, fifty out of fifty-seven corps commanders, and 154 out of 186 division commanders. In other words, much of the Red Army leadership had been wiped out, and one of the key figures behind the purge was Vyacheslav Molotov, who, from the beginning of May 1939, was the new Soviet Foreign Minister. While neither the British nor French knew the precise figures of the Red Army purge, they knew enough. These were hardly the kind of people to do business with, and it was one of the reasons why they had chosen to isolate the Soviet Union in recent years.
On the other hand, would Germany be foolish enough to invade Poland if it meant going to war with the Western powers and the Soviet Union? If war could be averted, surely, the British and French persuaded themselves, it would be worth dealing with the Russians?
Yet there had been mutual mistrust from the outset. The Russians were uncertain how honest were Western intentions. Precisely because of the purge, which had left the Red Army greatly weakened, Stalin was concerned about being left alone to face a hostile Nazi Germany on the Soviet borders – the inevitable outcome should Germany invade Poland. On the other hand, Britain and France, democracies both, were politically far removed from Communist Russia. Furthermore, Britain was still a monarchy. The Russians had executed their own royal family only twenty years earlier. In fact, Stalin seemed to execute rather a lot of people. In France, concerns were not only about the unsavoury nature of Stalin and his henchmen, but also about encouraging the growing support for Communism and fears of Soviet encroachment.
Then there were the Soviet demands. Both Britain and France had agreed to honour Poland’s sovereignty, but now Stalin wanted the two Western powers to honour the sovereignty of the Baltic States as well. Another thorny issue as yet unresolved was the Soviet insistence that the Red Army be allowed passage across Poland should the need arise, something the French had repeatedly tried in vain to persuade the Poles to accept.
Back and forth the negotiations went. Britain’s heart was not in it – the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, especially, had only been persuaded to enter talks at all by the weight of support to do so from his Cabinet. The French had been more anxious to come to some kind of agreement, but both sides were unable to find the form of terms on which they could agree.
Then suddenly, out of the diplomatic blue on 17 July, Soviet negotiators had demanded military talks, inviting a British and French military mission to Moscow. Such discussions face to face, the Soviets claimed, were essential before a political agreement could be agreed. So now, at the beginning of August, it appeared there was still a chance of striking a deal after all.
The British had swiftly drawn up their own proposed set of instructions for the talks in Moscow, and it was this weighty printed document that had now reached the Château de Vincennes. Among those in the French mission now wading through the British instructions was Capitaine André Beaufre, a thirty-seven-year-old staff officer recently posted to the General Staff from French North Africa. What struck him about the British dossier was its caution. The British were insisting there should be absolutely no passing on of any secret information, and that the Western allies should bear in mind constantly that German–Soviet collusion was possible. In other words, the Russians were not to be trusted under any circumstances.
In fact, it was all too clear to Beaufre that the prime objective of the British was not signing a treaty with the Soviet Union, but, rather, to spin out negotiations for as long as possible. Nevertheless, he still believed the mission offered a breath of hope; the Russians must, he thought, be serious about coming to some kind of accord. And that was something.
The President of the United States had always loved the sea and had a fascination both with the Navy and with sailing of any kind. Thus it was that he would take himself off on the presidential yacht whenever time allowed, and why, just a month earlier, he had taken his friend Harry Hopkins for a trip down the Patuxent River.
Another man who liked messing about in boats was Feldmarschall Hermann Göring, and that first weekend of August found him cruising around the Baltic islands in Carin II, his luxury yacht, named after his adored first wife, who had died eight years earlier.
No other leading Nazi enjoyed the opportunities for riches and extravagances as much as he. While Hitler liked things to be big – warships, offices, buildings, guns and so on – there was something of the puritan about him; his clothes were drab, he did not smoke or eat meat and nor did he drink. The same could not be said for Göring, who had had made for him a large array of flamboyant uniforms, had become fat on the excesses of food and fine wine, smoked the best cigars, and not only had a luxury yacht but also a fleet of luxury cars, and houses and estates filled with great works of art, games rooms and even, at Carinhall, his mansion to the north of Berlin, a large model railway over which mechanical aircraft moved on wires. Göring loved luxury.
Although often portrayed as an overweight figure of ridicule, Göring was, rather, a highly intelligent and politically astute operator. Charismatic, he was also an arch-Machiavel and had cleverly used a combination of guile, charm and ruthlessness to attain a position of power and authority within the Nazi party that was second only to Hitler himself.
During the First World War, Göring had transferred from the trenches to the Air Force and had risen to command Jagdgeschwader 1, formerly led by Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron. After the war, he had continued flying, barnstorming at air shows and then for a Swedish airline. Making something of a name for himself in Swedish society, he had met the explorer Eric von Rosen, who had in turn introduced Göring to Carin von Kantzow, who became Göring’s first wife. It was also while staying at von Rosen’s country estate that Göring had spotted the swastika symbol; supposedly it was after seeing this Nordic rune in Sweden that Göring suggested to Hitler it be adopted as the symbol of the Nazis.
At the time that Göring met Carin von Kantzow and von Rosen, he had already begun to develop political ambitions, and back in Germany he met Hitler and was instantly captivated by this man and his fledgling political movement. Göring was by Hitler’s side at the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, when the Nazis attempted to seize power, and was shot in the groin for his trouble. His subsequent long and painful recuperation was aided by copious amounts of morphine, to which he became addicted. It was a habit he had never kicked; among the drug’s side-effects are the creation of a sense of euphoria, but it also plays havoc with glands and hormones, prompts outbursts of increased energy and vanity and also delusions, as well as monumental lows. Göring displayed all these symptoms. It did not stop him, however, from sticking loyally by Hitler’s side, or, during his moments of energy, demonstrating a razor-sharp political grasp and vision.
Throughout much of the 1920s and into the 1930s, the Nazis, or the National Socialists as they more formally called themselves, were at best a political irrelevance and at worst a joke. Only after the Crash of 1929 did Hitler and his Nazis start to gain ground, and even then it was slowly. In 1928, the Nazis had gained just 2.5 per cent of the vote; sales of Hitler’s memoir-cum-manifesto, Mein Kampf, had fallen so badly his publishers decided to hold back the second volume. In 1931, however, in the wake of the Crash, Britain dropped out of the gold standard, the anchor around which sterling, the world’s leading trading currency, had been based. This move turned a bad recession in the international community into a deep depression. Eleven other countries followed Britain in floating their currencies, but France, Germany and others stayed fixed on gold at their old parity. As sterling and other currencies devalued, so German exporters struggled; and it was on economic growth – industrial exports – that Germany’s peaceful and democratic growth and strategy for return to the forefront of world powers had been based.
Germany might well have devalued the Reichsmark, but such a move had its own risks and in any case had too many painful associations with the post-war hyperinflation of 1922–3. The USA also warned against such a move, telling the government it wanted to see Germany not only service its long-term loans but also protect its balance of payments by maintaining existing exchange controls. Thus, Germany found itself stuck to the gold standard but facing the devaluation of many of the currencies in which it gained most of its burgeoning foreign exchange.
The net result was rapidly rising unemployment and a surge in nationalism. Hitler and his Nazis had been unequivocal: the struggle – the ‘Kampf’ – was one for food, resources and living space, or Lebensraum. That, Hitler argued, could not be achieved by mutual international economic interdependence. It could be achieved only by military conquest. In other words, liberalism did not work.
With the policy of the 1920s now in ruins and the hard times returning, Hitler’s vision of nationalism started to gain ground. In the summer election of 1932, the Nazis won 37.2 per cent of the vote, and although there was no clear majority for any party, General Hindenburg, the German President, resisted the chance to make Hitler Chancellor. The Nazi leader refused any lesser post. This disappointed his supporters, and Hitler’s National Socialists actually lost ground in the second election that year, in November, when they got 33 per cent of the vote.
By the start of 1933, there were also just the beginnings of economic recovery, but with politics now fractious and the current Chancellor, General Kurt von Schleicher, holding on to power in a weak coalition, a small group of disaffected right-wing conservatives – including the former Chancellor, Franz von Papen, ousted the previous summer – had then conspired to force Hindenburg to form yet another government, and one that included the Nazis. This meant offering Hitler the Chancellorship, even though the National Socialists’ popular vote was down. It was a post Hitler accepted.
In no way, however, was he brought to power by an overwhelming desire by the German people to adopt the Nazis’ policies of aggressive rearmament, military conquest, anti-Semitism and anti-Bolshevism. Rather, Hitler’s elevation came about as a result of Germany meeting a series of unpredicted forks in the roads and repeatedly taking the turn that led towards the emergence and then rise of the Nazis.
And, once Chancellor, Hitler had wasted no time in dismantling parliamentary democracy. A further election was called in March 1933, and by using strong-arm tactics and bullying the Catholic Centre Party, Hitler got the two-thirds majority he needed, and which then led him to pass the Enabling Law. This allowed his government to rule by decree and so ended parliamentary democracy in Germany. Other parties were banned, and a restriction was placed on the press. Jews and other non-Aryans were excluded first from the arts and then from owning land. The timing had been perfect: in the US, Roosevelt had just taken office and America was suffering a second dip in the depression, while France was equally preoccupied with its own political turmoil. The rest of the modern world was thus distracted. By the summer of 1934, when Hindenburg died, Hitler became the sole leader of the Third Reich, as Germany had become. He was now not only the Führer of the Nazis but of all Germans.
All through Hitler’s early struggles and the Nazi party’s long and troubled journey to power, Göring had never wavered in his loyalty to Hitler and in his dedication to the cause. Furthermore, while Hitler supplied the vision and rhetoric, Göring had been responsible for much of the apparatus. It was he who created the Schutzstaffel, or SS, initially Hitler’s personal bodyguard. Göring also created the Sicherheitsdienst, the SD, of which the Gestapo, the secret police, was a part. He was also responsible for establishing the concentration camps, initially detention centres for political prisoners. He became Speaker of the German Parliament, President of the Reichstag, Prime Minister of Prussia, President of the Prussian State Council, Reich Master of Forestry and Game, and the creator of the new German Air Force, which, under his command in 1935, became the Luftwaffe.
That same year, Hitler had given him control of Germany’s synthetic oil and rubber production – a vital role given the Reich’s lack of oil – and then, in 1936, he became Special Commissioner for the Four-Year Plan, over and above the Economics Minister, Hjalmar Schacht. His brief was to completely overhaul the German economy, to continue rearmament, oversee the stockpiling of resources, reduce unemployment, improve agricultural production, develop public works and stimulate other areas of production and industry.
This was a gargantuan undertaking and yet by surrounding himself with leading industrialists and bankers and by using his abundant charm, he concluded a number of bilateral deals in Yugoslavia, Sweden, Romania, Turkey, Spain and Finland, enabling Germany to build up resources of vital minerals such as tungsten, oil, nickel and iron ore, all of which were vital for war production. The German economy had been already on the rise before Hitler came to power, but by 1936 it was stable enough to begin a much larger rearmament programme. Early works projects had driven up employment figures, and although Germany remained dependent on imports, by continuing to drive down consumer spending the Nazis had been able to limit consumer imports, which enabled them to continue to buy in the raw materials needed for rearmament. Hitler had also harnessed German business to his plans for military conquest by banning trade unions and promising a bright future; this meant big companies like Krupp, IG Farben and Siemens were prepared to accept IOUs guaranteed by the Reichsbank, which enabled the process to get started almost as soon as Hitler took power.
Göring took these measures a stage further with the Four-Year Plan, revolutionizing the German economy even more and running much of the process through his own private cabal of advisors and specialists brought in from his own Prussian Ministry.
There were also plenty of bribes, secret deals and favours granted, but in the process he created a vast industrial empire. Realizing iron and steel production was under-performing, he set up his own iron and steel works, absorbing many smaller companies in the Ruhr Valley, Germany’s industrial heartland, as well as in Austria. His Hermann-Göring-Werke, or HGW, became one of the biggest conglomerations in Europe; what’s more, HGW was never state- or Nazi-owned – rather, it remained Göring’s own private concern. Furthermore, as the master of the Nazi economy, he controlled Germany’s entire foreign exchange reserves, while no independent corporation could purchase any imports without his say-so.
Göring’s achievements should not be belittled, even though the Führer’s backing made his task unquestionably easier. That Hitler could even contemplate risking war by the summer of 1939 was, to a large extent, thanks to his right-hand man. On the other hand, making a luxury-loving morphine addict and former barnstormer overlord of the Reich’s economy was a high-risk strategy to say the very least. But, then again, Hitler was an arch gambler, as the world was about to discover.
Göring was hardly risk-averse either, although he understood, perhaps better than the Führer, that Germany was still far from ready for all-out war against the world’s superpowers. Taking on Poland was one thing; taking on Britain, France and the Soviet Union as well, with the USA hovering in the background, was quite another. If Poland were to be attacked and the Danzig Corridor forcibly reclaimed, then it had to be done without the risk of drawing those other nations into the conflict.
During that first weekend in August, as he cruised on Carin II, he repeatedly asked his intelligence chief, Beppo Schmid, ‘What will the British do?’ A few days later, on 7 August, he clandestinely met seven British businessmen at a remote farmhouse on the west coast of Schleswig-Holstein. His friend, Birger Dahlerus, a Swedish businessman who had persuaded Göring he could mediate with the British on behalf of Germany, had set this up. At the meeting, Göring warned the British businessmen that Germany might well still negotiate with Russia. Over lunch, he then proposed a toast to peace. The businessmen, sent with the British Foreign Office’s backing, returned with an offer for Göring to meet with Chamberlain. In the days that followed, Göring and Dahlerus waited for a response. On 12 August, Göring telephoned his friend to tell him he had ordered Goebbels to go easy on the British in the press.
From the British, however, there remained only stony silence.
In Britain, as July had made way for August, the long, hot summer continued. Tuesday, 1 August 1939, was a fine, sunny day in southern England, and, in Kent, Edward Spears was visiting his old friend Winston Churchill, at Chartwell, the latter’s house near Westerham. Churchill was now a parliamentary colleague on the back benches, but Spears had come to know him during the last war. At the time, in 1915, Spears had been British liaison officer to the French 10e Armée and had accompanied Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, on a tour of inspection; a friendship had been forged. Later in the war, Spears had been promoted and had become a liaison officer between the French Ministry of War and the War Office in London; although his parents were British, he had been born and brought up in Paris and not only spoke faultless French but was unsurprisingly an ardent Francophile – as was Churchill.
After lunch, Churchill took Spears upstairs to the long, bright and sunny room where he worked. From there could be seen sweeping views across the rolling and peaceful Kent countryside. Spears had asked Churchill to read through his new book about the last war, which his friend had done with a few comments, passing on his condolences at Spears having just finished a book on one war when another looked likely to be about to begin.
Churchill was worried about Britain’s weakness in the air. Britain had put air power at the centre of its rearmament drive and yet, Churchill thought, the RAF was not strong enough. As it happened, Britain and Germany were virtually neck and neck in terms of aircraft production, at around 8,000 per annum, but Germany had been producing those kinds of figures for longer. At any rate, the Luftwaffe had some 2,000 front-line aircraft ready for action; the RAF had half that. Nor, he added, was the Air Force of the French strong enough – not compared with the German Luftwaffe. Materially, this was not the case; together, Britain and France could muster more planes than the Luftwaffe; operationally and tactically, however, Churchill was nearer the mark.
But both men had great faith in the French Army. Spears, especially, having spent so much time with the French in the last war, was ‘very fond’ of their army and shared in the martial pride of the officers he had known and worked alongside. He felt sure the current crop of young officers and men were worthy of their fathers. In a couple of weeks’ time, the two men were due to meet again, but this time in Paris as guests of Général Alphonse Georges, Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the French General Staff. Georges had promised them a tour of the Maginot Line and of French defences, something Churchill had been very keen to see for himself.
The conversation moved on to the forthcoming Anglo-French military mission to Russia, about which neither felt confident. Churchill, especially, had no doubt that the Russians would willingly turn the tables on Britain and France should they consider it to their advantage to do so.
In the meantime, they could only hope that a miracle might happen in Moscow. If so, then perhaps, even now, war might be averted.
One person who did not share Churchill’s and Spears’s unequivocal faith in the French Army was Capitaine André Beaufre. This bright and perceptive staff officer had been too young to take part in the last war, but had seen action in Morocco in the Rif campaign, where he had been badly wounded and almost died. Recovering, he been sent to the École de Guerre, and then had taken staff jobs at General Staff headquarters as well as posts back in French North Africa. Beaufre was a dynamic young officer and deep thinker – about all military and political matters – and it bothered him greatly that the French armed services, and the Army especially, seemed to be so instinctively defensive, so bereft of ideas.
Beaufre was among those in the French mission heading for talks in Moscow. The plan was to go to London first, meet the British team, then together sail to Leningrad. None of this suggested a huge amount of urgency. It was diplomacy, and it was all part of their efforts to avert war, but no one in either party appeared to have his heart in the process.
While Feldmarschall Göring had been cruising in his yacht, Beaufre and the French team under Général Aimé Doumenc (a senior, but not very senior, commander of the French 1st Military Region) arrived in London on the boat train on 4 August. The following day, they travelled to Tilbury Docks on the River Thames and boarded the City of Exeter, an ageing Ellerman Lines ship used for the South Africa run but chartered by the Royal Navy especially for the trip to Leningrad. Crewed entirely by turbaned Indians, the ship was, thought Beaufre, ‘a silent witness to the Empire’. With comforts Beaufre thought a little ‘passé’, the ship had a whiff of faded grandeur that could equally be applied to the joint mission.
Doumenc was the youngest general in the French Army but still sixty. Heading the British team was the fabulously named Admiral The Hon. Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, aged nearly sixty. Like Doumenc, he was a senior officer but by no means top-drawer. The senior British airman was the ruddy-faced, bushy-eyebrowed Air Vice-Marshal Sir Charles Burnett, who regaled Beaufre with tales from the Boer War. Capable and experienced though the mission undoubtedly was, it was hardly the line-up to dazzle the Russians.
As they steamed up towards the Baltic, there was the chance for the two missions to meet twice daily in what had been the children’s playroom and talk shop, and work out an agreed combined text that might be put to the Russians. The rest of the time they continued their leisurely cruise east, and bonded over copious meals of curry and deck tennis tournaments.
Eventually, on 9 August, they reached Leningrad. It was eleven o’clock at night, but the sky was still light with a milky brightness. On the quay, a few scruffy bystanders and some soldiers wearing green caps looked up to the bridge of the City of Exeter to see twenty-six officers in full Mess kit while the Indian crew, equally spick and span, brought the ship in. ‘It would be difficult,’ noted Beaufre, ‘to find a neater picture to sum up the difference between the two worlds which were now to confront one another.’
By the second week of August, the Italians were becoming increasingly worried, and none more so than Count Ciano. With mounting frustration and anger, he had realized they were being duped by their Axis partner over Poland. A few days earlier, Ciano had suggested to Mussolini that he meet mano a mano with von Ribbentrop and try to discover just what on earth was going on. He planned also to pursue Mussolini’s latest idea of holding a world peace conference. The last thing Ciano wanted was for Italy to become embroiled in a war at this time. Gold reserves were already reduced to nothing after catastrophically expensive campaigns in Abyssinia, misadventures in the Spanish Civil War, and limited rearmament. Stocks of metals were low, and the military was far from ready. ‘If the crisis comes,’ noted Ciano, ‘we shall fight if only to save our “honour”. But we must avoid war.’
And so the Italian Foreign Minister had flown to Salzburg in Austria the previous evening, and from there driven up to the Obersalzberg overlooking Berchtesgaden, where Hitler and so many of the Nazi elite had mountain villas.
The talks proved deeply unsatisfactory. With the Alps looming all around them, Ciano found his German counterpart evasive and the conversation tense. It was clear, though, that Hitler and Germany were set on war. They were, thought Ciano, ‘implacable’; von Ribbentrop rejected all Ciano’s suggestions for compromise. ‘I am certain,’ he scribbled later, ‘that even if the Germans were given more than they ask for they would attack just the same, because they are possessed by the demon of destruction.’ He was becoming horribly aware of how little their German allies valued Italian opinions.
The following day, after a dinner at which an icy chill of distrust had descended, Ciano met Hitler, whom he found every bit as determined to wage war as von Ribbentrop. ‘France and England will certainly make extremely theatrical anti-German gestures,’ Hitler told him, ‘but will not go to war.’ The Führer spoke highly of Il Duce but then glazed over and stopped listening the moment Ciano started telling him about the disastrous effect war would have on the Italian people.
Incensed, Ciano flew back to Rome, where he immediately reported to Mussolini at the Palazzo Venezia, recounting what had happened and admitting his disgust with Germany, its leaders and its way of doing things. ‘They have betrayed and lied to us,’ he said. ‘Now they are dragging us into an adventure which we have not wanted and which might compromise the regime and the country as a whole. The Italian people will shudder in horror.’ He urged Mussolini to declare that Italy would not fight against Poland and to simply step away from that obligation of the Pact of Steel. At first Mussolini agreed, then changed his mind and said that honour compelled Italy to march with Germany. Ciano left him, aware that he would have to work hard over the ensuing days to turn Il Duce’s mind and ‘arouse in him every possible anti-German reaction in any way I can’. War alongside Germany, Ciano was convinced, would spell doom for Italy. Somehow, some way, it had to be averted.