Some time back, shortly after the reoccupation of the Rhineland, Hitler had made a fresh effort to bring England over to his side. Once again he did not employ the Foreign Office, by now relegated to a technical apparatus for routine tasks. Hitler was bent on carrying out his designs largely by himself, with the aid of special envoys. Since the happy conclusion of the naval pact, he considered Joachim von Ribbentrop a natural-born diplomatic genius and expert on the British mentality. Hitler now assigned him the task of bringing about the alliance with England.
His choice could hardly have been worse, but also hardly more characteristic. In the end none of the leading personalities of the Third Reich came in for such unanimous contempt as Ribbentrop. Friend and foe denied that there was anything in the least likable about him, or that he had the slightest practical competence. The favor and protection that this henchman enjoyed with Hitler from the summer of 1935 on indicates to what extent the Führer was already using mere instruments and seeking relationships whose chief element was servility. For Ribbentrop’s bombast and pompousness toward the outside world were matched by an almost lunatic obsequiousness toward Hitler. Forever wearing the clouded brow of the statesman, he was the quintessence of the petty bourgeois type that had risen so rapidly with the class shifts after 1933. Now he was busily casting his resentments and catastrophic inclinations into demonic molds of historic grandeur. Soon he designed a fancy diplomatic uniform for himself; the epaulets were embroidered with a globe on which the German eagle perched proprietarily.
Ribbentrop now conveyed a message, via a mediator, to British Prime Minister Baldwin proposing a personal meeting between the Prime Minister and Hitler. Such a conversation would “determine the fate of generations,” he said, and would represent the fulfillment of the German Chancellor’s “greatest wish.” Baldwin was a great procrastinator; he was phlegmatic and loved his comfort. As one of his intimates has described it, the go-between had great difficulty in getting the Prime Minister to look up from his evening game of patience and hear out the proposal. Still less was he interested in the enthusiastic feelings the proposal awoke in his entourage. Baldwin instinctively drew away from complications of this sort. He was no more concerned with this fellow Hitler than he was with the rest of Europe, of which, as Churchill bitingly commented, he knew little and disliked what he knew. But if there had to be a meeting, let Hitler come to see him; he did not like either planes or traveling by boat. The thing was not to make any great fuss about it. Perhaps, he conceded, the Chancellor could come in August; they could meet in the mountains or in the Lake District. That was about all he cared to say about the matter. “Then a drop of Malvern soda water and to bed,” the report concludes. Later on, there was some talk of arranging the meeting on a ship off the English coast. Hitler himself, his adjutant of the time has related, “beamed with joy” at the thought of the impending meeting.25
In the meantime he had enlarged his scope to include Japan in his system of alliances. In the spring of 1933 he had first mentioned that Far Eastern country as a possible ally alongside of England and Italy. In spite of all the racial incompatibilities, Japan seemed like an Asiatic version of Germany: late on the scene, disciplined, and unsatiated; moreover she had a common border with Russia. According to Hitler’s new plan, all England had to do was to keep quiet in Eastern Europe and the Far East. Germany and Japan together, each secure in her rear, could attack the Soviet Union from two sides and destroy it. They would thus be freeing the British Empire of an acute threat. At the same time, they would be extirpating the sworn enemy of the existing order, of Old Europe. And they would be securing themselves Lebensraum. Hitler pursued this concept of a world-embracing anti-Soviet alliance for two years, trying principally to make it attractive to the British. Early in 1936 he proposed it to Lord Londonderry and Arnold J. Toynbee.
The planned meeting with Baldwin fell through; why, we do not exactly know, but it would appear that Eden’s vigorous objections were a significant factor. And although Hitler was “gravely disappointed” that the British had repulsed his fourth attempt at a rapprochement, he still did not give up. In the summer of 1936 he appointed Ribbentrop to succeed Leopold von Hoesch, the deceased German ambassador in London. Ribbentrop’s assignment was to transmit to the British the offer of a “firm alliance,” in which “England was merely to allow Germany a free hand in the East.” That was, as Hitler told Lloyd George shortly afterward, “the last effort” to make Great Britain understand the aims and necessities of German policy.26
The effort was accompanied by a renewed campaign against Communism, “the ancient adversary and old enemy of mankind,” as Hitler put it in a significantly theological-sounding phrase. The Spanish Civil War had provided him with a plethora of new arguments and images. Thus he evoked “the brutal mass slaughter of nationalist officers, pouring gasoline over the wives of nationalist officers and setting fire to them, slaughtering the children and babies of nationalist parents.” And he predicted similar horrors for France, which had already completed the transition to the Popular Front: “Then Europe will drown in a sea of blood and tears,” he prophesied. “European culture which—fertilized by classical antiquity—has a history that will soon reach two and a half millennia, will be replaced by the crudest barbarism of all time.” Along with this, in those apocalyptic images he so favored, he offered himself as the bulwark and refuge: “The whole world may begin to burn around us, but the National Socialist State will tower like platinum out of the Bolshevistic fire.”
But although the campaign was extended over months, it did not produce the expected result. The British, too, were certainly aware of the Communist menace, but their phlegmatic tempers, their soberness, and their distrust of Hitler were stronger than their fear. By November, 1936, however, Japan was prevailed upon to sign the Anti-Comintern Pact. The treaty provided for common defensive measures against Communist subversion; both parties swore that they would make no political agreements with the U.S.S.R., while in case of an attack by the Soviet Union they would take no measures which might be helpful to the aggressor. For the rest, Hitler hoped that the weight of the German-Japanese-Italian triangle would soon add some additional pressure to his own wooing of England. But he seems also to have begun to think of other ways to force Britain to leave him free to march eastward. At any rate, there are indications that from the end of 1936 on, he no longer totally excluded from his considerations the idea of a war against the England which obstinately resisted all his blandishments.27
Psychologically, this change can undoubtedly be traced to the mounting self-confidence that followed from his series of successes. “Today we have once again become a world power!” he proclaimed in the Munich Hofbräuhaus on February 24, 1937, at the annual celebration of the party’s founding. A new tone of challenge and impatience can be detected in all his speeches of this period. In the impressive balance sheet of achievements with which he came before the Reichstag on January 30, 1937, after four years of his government, he “most solemnly” withdrew Germany’s signature from the discriminatory clauses of the Versailles Treaty. Shortly afterward, he mocked at the “Esperanto languages of peace, of reconciliation among nations” that weaponless Germany had spoken for years. “It would seem that this language is not so well understood internationally. Our language is being understood again only since we have had a large army.” And, reverting to the old Lohengrin image, the idea of the White Knight with whom he usually identified, he declared: “We move through the world as a peace-loving angel, but one armed in iron and steel.”