Nazi gamesmanship

The British diplomat Robert Vansittart had been warning against Nazism for years, so it was a surprise when he and his wife showed up in Berlin for a two-week ‘holiday’ during the 1936 Olympics. ‘Van’ was impressed by German organisation. ‘These tense, intense people are going to make us look like a C nation,’ he wrote in a confidential report. The anti-appeaser had meetings with Hitler and the principal henchmen, and took a particular shine to Goebbels: ‘a limping, eloquent, slip of a Jacobin… My wife and I liked him and his wife at once.’

Van even came to think he might have misjudged the Nazis, though a lapse by the newly appointed ambassador to London, Von Ribbentrop, gave him pause. Van reported back the German’s remark during an otherwise cordial lunch that ‘if England doesn’t give Germany the possibility to live, then there would eventually be war between them, and one of them would be annihilated.’