Hitler parried the Britons’ efforts to draw Germany into any multilateral agreement, such as a pact covering Austria or German readmission to the League of Nations. He noted that he “could give the British ministers the assurance that Germany would never declare war on Russia,” but added that Bolshevik doctrine, political aims, and military capabilities meant that “from Russia there was greater probability of war than from other countries. Moreover, the risks for Russia in a possible war were smaller than those for other powers. Russia could with impunity allow the occupation of great tracts of her territory as large as Germany; she could permit bombardment of great regions; she could therefore wage war without risking destruction.” It was a shrewd lament, and revealed Hitler’s deepest preoccupations.
A skeptical Eden voiced doubts that the Soviet Union would initiate a war. Hitler pronounced himself “firmly convinced that one day cooperation and solidarity would be urgently necessary to defend Europe against the Asiatic and Bolshevik menace.” The Führer thanked his guests and voiced hope that they had understood his efforts to raise his country to equal status with other nations. “The British ministers,” according to their record, avowed that they “would take away very pleasant memories of the kindness and hospitality shown them.”20 In the evening, Hitler, in tails, hosted a banquet and concert at the Chancellery. Press accounts made it hard to discern what, if anything, had transpired. But the mere fact of the visit conveyed British readiness to renegotiate already imposed treaty obligations.
Stalin’s spies in London (the Irish John King, a cipher clerk at the foreign office, recruited in mid-February 1935) and in Rome (Francesco Constantini, an Italian employee at the British embassy) each delivered copies of the British foreign office record of the conversation, which ran to 23,000 words. But NKVD intelligence forwarded a severely condensed Russian translation of just 4,000 words, selecting only certain statements, which they removed from context, to form a new single stream. Their editing made it seem that the British had given Hitler carte blanche to annex Austria and schemed to instigate a Nazi-Soviet clash.21 “Mister Hitler,” the NKVD version of the British record had the Nazi stating, “would not sign an agreement he could not accept, but if he did take on obligations, he would never violate them.”22
Being fed what he craved, Stalin’s suspicions were further incited by the fact that Eden, on the way to Berlin, had stopped over in Paris to sound out the French about readmitting Germany into the League and a possible arms limitation agreement. French foreign minister Pierre Laval, Stalin knew, had been noncommittal. “Laval told Eden France could renounce aid from the Little Entente and the USSR only if England signed a military alliance, a Franco-English military alliance,” according to an intelligence report about the conversation from a Soviet agent in the French foreign ministry, on which Stalin wrote, “Important. (Truthful.) My archive.”23
Laval waved the Soviet card to break through British hesitation, but the British establishment was cool even to the “entente” it had signed with France in 1932, let alone to a real bilateral alliance.24 British secret services, starved of resources, a bit old-fashioned, and uncoordinated, contributed to government ignorance, sometimes willful, of the capabilities, let alone the intentions, of Hitler’s regime.25 Never mind that Hitler’s boasting that Germany would be a “world power” or nothing uncannily echoed British declarations about their own empire: many British officials believed or wanted to believe that German rearmament was, or would be, limited, gradual.26 The fright over Hitler’s assertion of air parity did consolidate moves to some British rearmament.27 But even those Brits who took a dark view of Nazi Germany remained eager to nip the developing arms race in the bud with some sort of accommodation.
STRANGE PEOPLE