Round and round the carousel went. German-Japanese, Western-Soviet, Western-German, and German-Italian negotiations all proceeded simultaneously. German officials, far more than British ones, had come to understand the importance of the Japanese question for the Soviet Union, and the difficulty of reconciling Tokyo and Moscow. But nothing was certain, except more intrigue. If diplomacy is the art of managing competing state interests by recognizing other states’ vital interests and keeping communication open, then finding one another’s bottom line, the principals here could barely comprehend how the other states’ systems worked, let alone their aims. Hitler now seemed at loggerheads with Britain, nearing a war over Poland, but his propaganda portrayed history since 1789 as one long march toward “Judeo-Bolshevism,” nihilism, and anarchy, which Nazism alone could halt.334 Hitler claimed a self-assigned burden to fight on behalf of “civilization” against Jews and other purveyors of international-revolutionary inequity—such as Stalin. Could the Führer really be stopped or even deflected?
CHAPTER 11PACT
In his present mood, PM [Neville Chamberlain] says he will resign rather than sign alliance with Soviet.
SIR ALEXANDER CADOGAN,
HITLER: “The scum of the earth, I believe?”
STALIN: “The bloody assassin of the workers, I presume?”
DAVID LOW,
ALMOST THE ENTIRE SUMMER OF 1939, Hitler would be absent from Berlin, ensconced at the Berghof, in the Obersalzberg, with Eva Braun, his longtime companion, leaving little central government to speak of. The Führer made strategic decisions, but their shape and timing depended to an extent on who might, or might not, enjoy access to him. Foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop—or his liaison—was contriving to show up at the Berghof to cajole Hitler into taking the plunge of rapprochement with the “Judeo-Bolsheviks.” For such a coup de main, the insecure Ribbentrop might seem an unlikely personage. Growing up, he had been middle class, then married the heiress to a champagne fortune, acquired knowledge of French and English, traveled Europe as a wine salesman, and cajoled an aunt into legally adopting him so that he could obtain her (recently acquired) aristocratic title. “Von” Ribbentrop had joined the Nazis late (1932), and, some said, only at his wife’s urging.2 Goebbels said of him, “He bought his name, he married his money, and he swindled his way into office.” For Hitler’s interpreter, Paul-Otto Schmidt, Ribbentrop called to mind the dog on the label of the gramophone company His Master’s Voice. “If Hitler was displeased with him,” Schmidt noted, “Ribbentrop went sick and took to his bed like an hysterical woman.”3 Göring mocked Ribbentrop as “Germany’s No. 1 parrot” and badmouthed him to the Führer. “But,” the Führer would respond, Ribbentrop “knows a lot of important people in England.” Göring was scathing: “Mein Führer, that may be right, but the bad thing is, they know him.”4
Ribbentrop was a tool. But he was not only a tool. When serving as ambassador to the Court of St. James’s—a posting he had gotten only as a consolation for originally being passed over for state secretary—he had rarely been at his post, for he was courting Hitler or negotiating with Japan and Italy for an alliance against Britain. When in London, he was mocked in British circles as “von Brickendrop,” infamous for mistreating all and sundry, including the tailors who served the British aristocracy and related stories of his imperiousness to their clientele. In Ribbentrop’s mind, however, the British had maltreated him.5 Now, for such a staunch Anglophobe, a deal with Moscow could be his revenge, and a stunning feather in his foreign minister’s cap.6 Otto von Bismarck—ostensibly a lodestar for Ribbentrop—had famously established good relations with Russia as a key to Germany’s aggrandizement. In truth, Ribbentrop could not even abide working in Bismarck’s modest old office at 76 Wilhemstrasse. (Back in the day, the Iron Chancellor had also been his own foreign minister.) Instead, the Nazi foreign minister moved his office to the former presidential palace next door, which was his official residence.7 But Ribbentrop operated by intuition and strove to be “radical,” rarely invoking limits (or consequences), which pleased Hitler no end. And what could be more radical, in its way, than a deal with Communist Moscow?