In January 1938, Robert Vansittart’s important role as permanent under-secretary to the British Foreign Office was taken over by the uncle of Lady Camilla Stauffenberg (the pretty young Englishwoman who fell in love with – and later married – the young man she met while acting in As You Like It at a Bavarian schloss). Small, brisk and ruddy-cheeked, Alexander Cadogan was perched in the seat of authority throughout the month that Hitler coolly annexed the land of his birth to Germany, in the Anschluss. Vansittart might have considered issuing some form of protest; Cadogan saw no point in getting mixed up in foreign affairs. ‘After all, it wasn’t our business,’ he wrote to Nevile Henderson, Britain’s pro-Nazi ambassador in Berlin on 22 April: ‘we had no particular feelings for the Austrians’.1
Cadogan, having made his opinion clear, saw no reason to consult Henderson about a report relating to further expansion plans that had reached him a month earlier. The informant was Captain Malcolm Christie, a former pilot who had become, since 1932, one of Robert Vansittart’s most trusted agents in Berlin. Christiesent word that Hitler’s next targeted victim was to be Czechoslovakia; he added that ‘cooler heads’ in Germany (by which he meant Hitler’s opponents) were hoping that France and England would condemn this venture. He anticipated that an attack on the Czech borderlands would be launched within two to three months.2
With retrospect, it is easy enough to see how, from the Anschluss onwards, Hitler’s designs to seize Germany’s neighbouring lands followed a six-monthly pattern: Austria in the spring; the Sudetenland in the autumn; Czechoslovakia in the spring; Poland in the autumn. At the time, although Czechoslovakia’s future was giving cause for anxiety in England (‘The German Minority in Czechoslovakia’ had been chosen for discussion at Chatham House as early as 1 November 1937), such a programme was not apparent. The warning from Christie was passed to Neville Chamberlain – and was set aside.
In Germany, Hitler proceeded as he had planned. Czechoslovakia, in the summer of 1938, was ordered to prepare to yield its western borders (the Sudetenland) to Germany, or to face armed invasion. England, so Hitler’s envoys had led him to believe, would not object. Ribbentrop had brought back scornful accounts of an enfeebled island nation, run by elderly, peace-loving aristocrats who dreaded nothing more than confrontation. A recent interview with Lord Halifax by Hitler’s tigerishly handsome adjutant, Captain Fritz Wiedemann, had produced further reassurance. Halifax, according to Wiedemann and his enterprising Jewish mistress, Princess Stephanie Hohenlohe, was longing for that happy moment when England’s friend, the Führer, would ride forth along the Mall at the side of George VI.*
A different view of Britain was held by a group of high-ranking dissidents who controlled the only military intelligence unit in Germany that could rival the powers of the SS: the Abwehr. Informed of Hitler’s plans for expansion as early as the beginning of November 1937, these sober Prussian generals had been appalled by his ambitions. By the summer of 1938, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris and Colonel Ludwig Beck had prepared a scheme of action of their own. Confident that Britain and France would oppose any further acts of annexation, they proposed to use that moment of attack on the Sudetenland to stage a coup, arrest Hitler and establish a new government in Germany. On 19 August, a lone envoy was despatched to secure the backing of the British. War was never on the agenda. What was required from England by the Abwehr generals was a simple show of moral resolve and diplomatic support: at the moment that Hitler moved, Britain must speak up for the menaced territory. They asked, in short, not for war, but for the threat of war.
Born in 1881, the envoy was an old-fashioned aristocrat who belonged to the same religious, monarchist and resolutely anti-Nazi family as Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s hostess in Pomerania. Dressed in civilian clothes, Ewald von Kleist passed unobtrusively through Tempelhof Airport and was flown to Croydon. Arriving at the Foreign Office, he was interviewed by Robert Vansittart, the embittered man who now bore the impressive title of chief diplomatic advisor. Kleist presented the bare bones of the plan; Vansittart, impressed, did the best he could. He put Kleist in touch with Winston Churchill. (Later, when Sir Robert turned against the resistance, he claimed that Kleist had made unacceptable demands for ‘a deal’ over the ever-contentious Polish corridor. That was an embellishment; the corridor had formed no part of the discussion.)
Churchill, during the mid-thirties, had been one among the many politicians in foreign governments who admired Hitler’s achievements. Writing for the Strand Magazine in November 1935, he declared that England, if placed under the moral and economic strains that had been imposed on Germany after the war, would consider herself fortunate indeed to find such a powerful leader as Adolf Hitler, a man ‘to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations’.3 By 1938, however, Churchill had reached the unfashionable viewpoint that today seems admirably prescient. Hostile to Hitler and profoundly uneasy about the Führer’s future intentions, the 64-year-old statesman embraced the idea of any activity that would cut the German despot down.
The meeting took place at Chartwell. Kleist, once again, explained the need not for action, but for a display of strength. Churchill, acting with the approval of Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, and breaking all the rules of diplomatic protocol, offered to provide Kleist with a letter of written assurance. If Hitler proceeded with his threatened attack upon the Sudetenland (envisaged by Churchill as an act of military aggression), Britain would not stand peacefully aside. Indeed, he wrote to Kleist: ‘The spectacle of an armed attack by Germany upon a small neighbour and the bloody fighting that will follow will rouse the whole British Empire and compel the gravest decisions. Do not, I pray you, be misled upon this point.’4
Churchill’s letter – it was incriminating enough to seal the recipient’s fate when it was later discovered among his papers – was joyfully shared with Kleist’s fellow conspirators in the Abwehr.* What these principled men failed to understand was that, however fine such assurances sounded, they were worthless. Robert Vansittart, by the summer of 1938, commmanded a degree of influence but very little authority; Winston Churchill, not the Foreign Secretary, had signed the letter. Fretfully established on the fringes of power, Churchill was helpless to influence events if his less warlike Prime Minister disagreed.
The Abwehr plan for a coup d’état against Hitler remained on course, despite the resignation of Colonel Beck, throughout the anxious final days of August 1938. Hitler, once challenged by Britain, was to be arrested and certified by Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s father, Karl, one of Germany’s most eminent psychiatrists. Fritz Schulenburg, the only one of Tisa’s brothers who had turned entirely against the Nazi regime (a change of heart which had been prudently hidden from his family, including Tisa), was to secure the administrative sector of Berlin, pending the establishment of a new government in Germany.
On 5 September 1938, news of the imminent coup was conveyed to Lord Halifax by Theo Kordt, a resistance worker who was operating from within the German Embassy in London. On 12–13 September, a German envoy flew into England with a further message for Vansittart. Hitler was preparing to march east towards Czechoslovakia on 25 September. The moment had come for England to stand by her promise.
And – notoriously – the moment passed. Apprised of the need for urgent action, the Prime Minister flew out to meet Hitler – it was only the second time in his life that Neville Chamberlain had ever left England – on 15 September 1938. Having assured the Führer that Britain would neither threaten Germany, nor oppose in any way Hitler’s current plans, Chamberlain held a further discussion with President Daladier of France about what – without risk – might be done to demonstrate good faith. The Czechs were advised that England and France would defend their country’s own continued state of independence, but only if they conceded to Germany the mountainous Sudetenland in which lay all their defences. France, at this moment, exhibited more courage than England. When Czechoslovakia responded, on 23 September, by mobilising her troops against attack, the French followed suit.
Daladier had acted as the Abwehr generals still hoped that their friends in England would. Chamberlain pursued an entirely different course. The humiliation of the Czechs and the loss of the Sudetenland seemed to him a small price to pay for the future security of England. To the anger of Daladier and the dismay of the Czechs (who were excluded from all negotiations), the Munich Pact was signed by an exhausted but triumphant Chamberlain at 1.30 a.m. on 30 September 1938. Hitler had been confronted with no challenge. Instead, he had acquired, without bloodshed, the right to enter and possess himself of the Sudetenland and – implicitly – to exercise control over an unprotected Czechoslovakia.
Alighting at Croydon a few hours later, Neville Chamberlain delivered a proclamation that was, for a habitually sober speaker, almost ecstatic. Behind him, in several of the news photographs, it is possible to see the wan figure of Theo Kordt staring straight ahead, expressionless, as the Prime Minister flourishes the document on which Hitler had, without a moment’s hesitation, scribbled his signature. Chamberlain himself had chosen the wording. Hitler, having seen how easy it was to gain Britain’s acquiescence, was delighted to endorse every word. Certainly, he shared in the ‘desire of our two peoples never to go to war against each other again’. How could he ever wish to go to war against such an obliging ally?
Back in England, where almost nothing was known, in the years before the war, about the existence of an opposition movement within Germany itself, Chamberlain’s announcement was received with relief, but not with universal rejoicing. Duff Cooper, addressing an almost silent House of Commons in his speech of resignation on 3 October, pointed out that Chamberlain, referring in Parliament six days earlier to the Czechs who inhabited the Sudetenland as these ‘people of whom we know nothing’, could just as well have been talking about the people of Serbia in 1914.5 At the Oxford Union, two weeks after Duff Cooper’s resignation, a young Edward Heath defended (and won by 320 to 266 votes) a proposal startlingly different to that of 1933: ‘That This House deplores the Government’s Policy of Peace without Honour’. In Charlie Chaplin’s American studios, the English-born director prepared his own response: The Great Dictator set out to make Hitler look both menacing and absurd. Warnings were instantly issued from Chaplin’s anxious homeland that any film making fun of the Führer would be banned from view in Britain.*
Walking through London a day or so after Chamberlain’s announcement, the novelist Morgan Forster mused on the hollowness of the applause with which the Prime Minister’s words had been greeted: ‘I knew at once that the news was only good in patches. Peace flapped from the posters, and not upon the wings of angels.’6
Peace, nevertheless, remained welcome to England in the autumn of 1938; not least because its politicians, dismayed by Hitler’s claims of Germany’s military strength, believed their country was – as yet – entirely unequipped to win a war against such a formidable power. Behind the scenes, with ever-increasing urgency, strategies were being frantically sought for the preservation of peace.
The group of men who had assembled around Wilhelm Canaris at the Abwehr were only a few among a considerable number of German subjects who were desperately searching, between 1937 and December 1940, for the framework of a negotiated peace that might save the world from a second devastating war. In Britain, one of the most tireless groups of peace-seekers convened regular meetings at an unobtrusive flat in Cornwall Gardens. This ‘safe house’ for agents and visiting diplomats, tucked away in the streets behind the Albert Hall, belonged to Philip Conwell-Evans, a Welsh-born academic who had translated Georges Duhamel’s Civilization (a disturbing collection of wartime stories) and written on international affairs in collaboration with the Labour politician Lord Noel-Buxton, before accepting a chair in international diplomacy at the University of Königsberg.*
Conwell-Evans’s distressing experience of working at a German university in 1933, during the period when professors were being brusquely dismissed, was offset by his sense that Hitler was bringing confidence and strength back into a broken land. Returning to England in 1934, Conwell-Evans’s German connections led him to join the new Anglo-German Fellowship, the body that he would faithfully serve as secretary, alongside Ernest Tennant. Introduced to Philip Lothian, Conwell-Evans found himself in sympathy with Lothian’s views about the injustices that had been inflicted upon Germany at Versailles. He became a regular visitor to Blickling, participating in the conferences held there during the mid-thirties, but always taking the view that a victimised Germany was entitled to increase her boundaries and to conduct her internal policies, however disagreeable, without interference from Britain. It was a view which Lord Lothian, back in the mid-thirties, promoted and endorsed, both at Blickling and through the series of international talks that he was tirelessly organising at Chatham House in London.
Enlightenment came to Conwell-Evans in 1937, when he was introduced to two remarkable German brothers. Erich Kordt was a pre-war Rhodes scholar who had access to privileged information through his position in Ribbentrop’s Berlin-based Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Theo, his older brother, had taken over Erich’s previous position as an attaché at the German Embassy in London. Both brothers were profoundly concerned by what was happening in Germany, as was their lively and attractive young cousin, Suzanne Simonis, a girl whose formidable memory added to her value as a willing go-between and message courier. The Kordts, once their new associate had expressed a wish to assist their clandestine activities, introduced him to a man for whom Philip Conwell-Evans would conceive an enduring admiration. His name was Malcolm Christie.
Born (like Conwell-Evans himself) in 1881 and trained as an engineer, Malcolm Christie had been educated in Germany before he joined the Royal Air Force in 1914. Following four years as an air attaché in America, and a further three-year stint at a similar post with the British in Berlin, Christie’s circle of contacts was both wide and impressive. In 1926, aged 45, he was officially retired on grounds of ill-health; unofficially, as a fluent linguist with a coolly rational mind, a formidable memory and a gift for inspiring loyalty, Christie became an invaluable undercover agent for MI6.
Respected in London for his friendly connections with various German industrialists (he was especially close to Gustav Krupp von Bohlen, an anti-Nazi in a family whose armaments business bound them to Hitler), Christie’s especial value lay in the close links that he had formed, in part through his experience as a pilot and a skilled engineer, with Hermann Goering. The friendship, dating back to the years before the Reich, was intimate enough for the loquacious and boastful Goering to act, unwittingly, as one of Christie’s most cherished sources of information.
Quiet, intelligent, resourceful and courteous, Christie was both liked and trusted by Robert Vansittart, with whom – in the years when ‘Van’ was a force to be reckoned with and one of the German resistance’s most powerful allies – he shared the conviction that England’s salvation lay in arming herself to the teeth.
Much of the information that Christie supplied to Vansittart was kept by him in copy and forms part of a collection now held at Churchill College in Cambridge. The detail of the espionage, some of which was supplied by the Kordts, but much of which came from a range of sub-agents who worked for Christie, is remarkable for its specific nature. Reports included a minutely factual analysis of Hitler’s takeover of the Saar region in 1935, and the ensuing plebiscite; conversations with Goering, and quantified disclosures, regularly submitted between 1933 and 1939, on the current strength of the Luftwaffe. Christie’s contacts were located in Switzerland, Holland, Czechoslovakia and inside Germany itself, where an intriguing figure called Gerhard Ritter, signing himself most frequently as Kn, acted as Christie’s most regular source of information. The material that Malcolm Christie meticulously passed along to Robert Vansittart from this richly diverse group of informants indicates that the Foreign Office was made aware, at all stages before the war, of what was being planned in Germany.
For Christie and his associates, the knowledge that so much was being supplied, while nothing was being done, must have been both frustrating and painful. In March 1936, Christie warned Vansittart of the Rhineland invasion a day ahead of that event. On 6 July 1937, he alerted Vansittart to a state of dissension both in the German government and on the General Staff. (Vansittart himself made a note that this report had been personally ‘suppressed by Eden’, the foreign secretary.)
Christie’s information was already being consistently blocked, buried or ignored at the Foreign Office before the abrupt removal, in January 1938, of Robert Vansittart from his position of power. Vansittart himself was reluctantly acknowledged to have acquired a level of expertise that proved hard to dispense with. Still called in for advice, he could, on occasion, control events as if nothing had changed. It was not to be expected that Christie, as his most valued agent, would receive similar respect from the new regime of Cadogan and Halifax. Nor did he. Among several disconcerting examples, one glares out.
In the spring of 1939, Ivone Kirkpatrick, recently transferred from the British Embassy in Berlin to advise on German affairs at the Foreign Office in London, read a note from Christie to Vansittart dated 18 May. It warned the Foreign Office of plans for a Nazi Soviet alliance. Having read it, Kirkpatrick marked the document ‘Unreliable’ and stowed it away. Three months later, the Nazis and Soviets shocked the world with their Russo-German pact. Questions were asked at the British Foreign Office about what, precisely, their intelligence operatives had been doing? No answer was forthcoming from a department that was already doing everything it could to cover its tracks.7
Christie did not give up. On 27 June 1939, he advised the Foreign Office of a September invasion of Poland; on 26 August, more precise details were given of where, and with what level of strength, the attack would take place.8 No response to this information was received or ever recorded. Doubtless, Christie’s letter went the way of its predecessor: slipped into a drawer and marked as unworthy of attention.
The attempt to influence larger events had failed. On a smaller, human scale, the intelligence agents and resistance fighters saluted each other for a valiant mutual effort that, as Germany prepared to invade Poland in September 1939, seemed doomed to failure. Malcolm Christie wrote to Theo Kordt, his tubby, tenacious and gallant ally at the German Embassy, as Kordt prepared to depart:
Dear Friend,
I hope you do not mind my addressing you thus, for friend you have been and are to your own great people, to us Britons, and to all who are struggling to restore the conceptions of honour and integrity amongst nations.
I am writing you these few lines to wish you a deeply felt ‘Auf Wiedersehn’. If you must leave us soon, ours is the loss: if a miracle should keep you here, ours to rejoice. Thank you a thousand times for all your noble work: come what may, we shall regard you always as a great gentleman and a great Christian.
Believe me, yours ever, M. Graham Christie.9
Peace, in the fear-filled autumn of 1939, was still being eagerly sought by both Britain and Germany. The first of many compromises proposed to England by Hitler, on 6 October 1939, aroused a frenzy of excitement and hope. Andrew Roberts, in his fine biography of Lord Halifax, The Holy Fox, has noted that 2450 letters reached Chamberlain’s office over the next three days and that 75 per cent of them begged Britain to accept Hitler’s proposals. In November, when the Kings of Holland and Belgium presented another peace overture, the renowned pacifist and former Labour leader George Lansbury received a postbag from 14,000 eager advocates. Halifax, writing to his friend Philip Lothian in his new post as ambassador to the United States during that same month, passed along the news that the Foreign Office was now in ‘almost daily’ receipt of peace feelers from the German resistance.10 His groan is almost audible.
By November 1939, Lothian had ceased to see any merit in a negotiated peace and Halifax himself had become sceptical. In March 1940, the Foreign Secretary was handed a remarkable peace proposal originating from one of the most eminent German resistance figures, Ulrich von Hassell, a former German ambassador to Italy. Written on 28 February, Hassell’s document ranged far beyond the usual compromises. Poland and Czechoslovakia were to be restored and allowed to become free democracies; Germany was to become a democratic republic, adhering to Christian ethics and restored to unfettered intellectual activity. It was not, however, explained just how this utopian world would be achieved, and Hassell’s proposals had initially reached a very doubtful Alexander Cadogan through a man called J. J. Lonsdale Bryans for whom Cadogan felt an instinctive mistrust.
Perhaps Cadogan’s instincts were right. Bryans reported back to von Hassell on 14 April that the letter had won over Halifax and gone straight to the Prime Minister. That was untrue. The letter reached Halifax – and stopped. Halifax went to Washington in December 1940, to serve as British ambassador to the US in the place of his late and dear friend Philip Lothian. Before leaving, he annotated the letter: ‘Mr Hassell. Note on principles considered essential for the re-establishment of permanent peace.’ In 1992, that proposal was still tucked away in a collection titled, with almost wilful drabness, ‘Private Office Papers from 1940’.11
By the close of 1940, Churchill had been prime minister for half a savage year. France was an occupied country; Britain, having survived a terrifying summer of aerial warfare, still lacked the substantial backing from America of which she increasingly stood in desperate need. Power and experience had hardened Churchill. Some 60,000 Germans living in England had been interned or deported within the first months of his leadership. In December 1940, a new order went out: all future appeals for peace or collaboration from Germany must be categorically rejected. Any members of the German resistance who attempted to negotiate a deal would henceforth be met (so Churchill instructed Anthony Eden, his secretary of state for war) with ‘absolute silence’.12
Robert Vansittart retired at the beginning of the war to live near the Denham film studio for which he had helped his friend Alexander Korda to secure government funding. Between diverting himself by writing poems, the newly ennobled Vansittart wrote a book. He broadcast it as his personal pep talk to the nation.
Published in 1941, Black Record: Germans Past and Present launched a savage attack on Germany and on the German people. While discreet about his own previous connection to the German resistance, the author was not afraid to dismiss his former friends and allies as feeble, unconvincing and dishonest.
Having repudiated the resistance in print, Lord Vansittart went on to marry his actions to his words. After the war, he was asked for a letter of support by gentle, reticent Theo Kordt, who was struggling to return with his wife to their home in the British-occupied Rhineland. Vansittart responded by posting off a public declaration that condemned Theo Kordt as a man whose policy had always been to give Hitler ‘a free hand in expansion to the limit’.13
Vansittart did worse. Approached by both of the Kordt brothers to help defend the name of Baron Ernst Weizsäcker (the widely respected former secretary of state) during the time when their heroic undercover colleague was put on trial as a war criminal by the United States, the former Foreign Office supremo fired off another public salvo. On this occasion, Vansittart proposed that neither Weizsäcker nor the Kordts themselves merited clemency of any kind, since none of them had done anything ‘in particular’ to help the British.14
Vansittart’s behaviour was shameful, but he was not alone in letting his former contacts down. Alexander Cadogan, to whom his niece, Camilla Stauffenberg, sent frantic pleas for support to be provided to Baron Weizsäcker’s case, found himself suddenly too busy to check his files for evidence of any link between Weizsäcker, the Kordts and the Foreign Office. (A strong connection had existed, however, and Cadogan assuredly knew it.) Lord Halifax, a deeply religious man, showed more of a conscience. Having despatched a sworn affidavit that declared, with untypical bluntness, that Lord Vansittart was lying through his teeth about the Kordts, Halifax sent a private letter of protest to President Truman about Ernst Weizsäcker’s entirely unjustifiable seven-year sentence to the Landsberg Fortress (a prison in which Hitler himself, back in 1924–5, had spent a mere eleven months for trying to overthrow the government). Halifax’s plea, combined with appeals for mercy that arrived from Bertrand Russell, Gilbert Murray, George Bell and even, eventually, the Pope, resulted in a qualified success. Imprisoned for a year – one month longer than Hitler, and without the degree of luxury that had been conferred upon a leader-in-waiting – the emaciated, stooping and prematurely aged Baron Weizsäcker died shortly after his release in 1950. Half a century later, his legally trained younger son, Richard, whohad helped to defend his father at the trial, was appointed as president of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Erich Kordt’s Nicht aus den Akten was published in Germany in 1948, in direct response to the arraignment and trial of Ernst Weizsäcker, Kordt’s friend. The fact that it contained detailed information about the reports that were passed by the Kordts and their allies to the Foreign Office caused a degree of concern in Whitehall. A refutation was mooted and, after a period of consideration, was abandoned. The book remains, to this day, without an English publisher.
Conwell-Evans wrote None So Blind: A Study of the Crisis Years 1930–1939 in 1941, basing it upon the voluminous bundles of papers that he had prevented Malcolm Christie from destroying in 1939, following the declaration of war. Meticulously, Conwell-Evans chronicled and cited the reports that Christie had passed, over the years, to Robert Vansittart. Christie himself contributed a final chapter to a remarkable account of the life of a secret agent.
Conwell-Evans hesitated to publish the book in wartime. In 1947, however, a hundred copies were privately printed for distribution to a carefully selected group of readers. The book never reached them. Instead, for reasons that remain undisclosed, the hundred copies were embargoed and placed in a bank vault, from which they were only (and most unwillingly) released to an executor after the death of Conwell-Evans in 1958. Since the book remains almost impossible to find (Amazon unfailingly lists it as ‘currently unavailable’ and no copy is held at the British Library), chances are that an embarrassing publication was then destroyed.
Conwell-Evans severed his connection with the Kordts after the war. The reason that their names do not appear in the pages of None So Blind, a book written during the war, is most likely to have been protective: identification would have endangered their lives in Germany. Even Malcolm Christie, paying tribute to their courage in his final chapter of Conwell-Evans’ None So Blind,described Theo and Erich only as ‘my German friends who worked during the years 1933–1939 to defeat Hitler’s war plans’. These brave men had, he wrote, taken great risks and shown uncommon courage in all their endeavours. ‘They were inspired by one purpose – to liberate their own country from the blight of Nazi rule and to help to save Europe from the devastation of another war. They were Europeans in the best sense of that term . . .’15
In 1971, the ninety-year-old Christie died after mysteriously falling from his bedroom window. In 1972, the former agent’s devoted housekeeper donated all of his surviving papers to Churchill College, Cambridge. Separately, and prudently, she lodged with the London Library Christie’s single precious copy of the elusive None So Blind. It is there still. The flyleaf label of a book that is not often read carries a simple inscription, written by an unknown hand: ‘In Memory of Malcolm Christie’.
Footnotes
* This remarkable image owed less to the cautiously spoken Lord Halifax than to the fantasies of Princess Stephanie’s British paymaster, Lord Rothermere. Rothermere was later obliged to admit that the voluptuous Princess received $20,000 a year for her services as a press informant and go-between. Rothermere himself went so far as to suggest that Hitler should add Romania to his land-grab list.
* Kleist, implicated in the Stauffenberg Plot of 20 July 1944, was hanged at Plötzensee Prison in April 1945. He was 64 years old. His son and namesake, whom the elder Kleist had encouraged to undertake a suicide attack on Hitler in January 1940 (it failed because the Führer suddenly decided not to show up for his appointment) survived the war.
* War changed everything. Released in England in 1940, The Great Dictator became one of Chaplin’s greatest successes.
* Lord Noel-Buxton’s interests included the Balkan States and the League of Nations.