by Peter Day
Rostin resurfaced in London in the late 1930s, working as a salesman for a ladies swimming costume company and as a director of the London branch of Horcher’s, a Berlin restaurant fashionable with the Nazi hierarchy. Klop was surprised to bump into him in Piccadilly Circus and realise that despite his Jewish background he was still working for the Nazi regime. He alerted his colleagues at MI5 who would have interned him when war broke out if he had not fled to Switzerland, where Klop and Rostin would have one last, fateful meeting.63
With Rostin out of the way, Klop ruled the roost once more and in April 1928 he discussed with Norton the problem of Fichtebund propaganda – a nationalist group in Hamburg whose pamphlets became part of the Nazi propaganda machine. A few days later Hans Dieckhoff, Counsellor at the German embassy, visited Norton who raised the issue again. Dieckhoff handed him a file of correspondence between himself and his superiors in Berlin, showing the efforts he had been making to curb the worst excesses. Norton recorded:
It reveals (what, indeed, we knew) that the relations between the Wolff Bureau and the German Embassy and Foreign Office are very close indeed. It seems that Mr Ustinov reports to the German Embassy and also to his Chief, Herr Mantler, in Berlin, who takes the question up direct with the Wilhelmstrasse [German Foreign Office], which thereupon asks the embassy to report on it, a system of dual control which post-war Germany has not got rid of.64
In December 1930 Klop had a long conversation with Sir Arthur Willert about British and German policy. Three months earlier the Nazis had taken nearly 20 per cent of the vote in Reichstag elections. Lord Cecil had been conducting disarmament talks in Geneva on the British behalf but had predicted a fifteen-month delay. Willert suggested to Klop that although the German government, led by the Centre Party’s Heinrich Brüning, professed to support disarmament and to be alarmed by the rising support for Hitler, they might welcome the collapse of the talks as an excuse to break the restrictions placed on the German military after the First World War. Klop had agreed to try to put the British view across in his news agency reports but Willert had a different objective in mind. He wrote:
Mr Ustinov is very intimate with the German Embassy and one can take it for granted that, if not actually sent to ask questions such as these, he does not fail to report the answers to the Embassy.65
Klop would in due course find himself on even more intimate terms with his German Embassy colleagues as the Wolff Bureau was absorbed in the German propaganda operation. The pretence of impartiality was abandoned and he became an embassy press officer. In January 1932, Klop presented a fifteen-minute talk about Germany on BBC radio as the first of a series called Through Foreign Eyes. He maintained, and even increased, his liaison with the British Foreign Office but from 1930 onwards the records of those meetings have, with one exception, been carefully expunged from the official archives.
It may be coincidence, but 1930 was also the year in which Clifford Norton won a long-awaited promotion. He became private secretary to Sir Robert Vansittart, the permanent undersecretary at the Foreign Office. Throughout the 1930s, Vansittart was the most powerful, and often the loneliest, official opponent of appeasement. He did not trust even his own diplomats to reflect accurately Hitler’s true intentions. Nor did he rely on the massively underfunded and often ineffectual espionage efforts of MI6. Vansittart ran his own intelligence service. Norton was his unnoticed lieutenant, Klop one of his many sources.
Klop had also made the acquaintance of the diplomat Robert Bruce Lockhart who had been implicated in the 1918 plot to assassinate Lenin and was the former lover of the Russian aristocrat Moura Budberg. It appears that Lockhart may have met Nadia during his days in St Petersburg at the time of the Revolution, or at least known her family, since he recorded in his diary in March 1929:
Lunched with Ustinov, an ex-German airman, who is married to Benois’s daughter. He is the author of the brilliant expression: There will be no peace until men learn that it is a nobler and harder task to live for their country than to die for it.
A couple of months later he had lunch with Klop and Nadia at their flat in order to meet Hans von Raumer, a former German finance minister who was in Britain to improve his English. Among the other guests were Arthur Willert from the Foreign Office and the German diplomat Count Albrecht Bernstorff.
Bernstorff and Klop made it their business to try to influence British thinking against Hitler and Lockhart records in 1932 that he met them both at the Carlton Grill shortly after Klop had spent some time in Berlin and both men lectured him on being too pro-Hitler in his Evening Standard articles. Klop was at that stage still hopeful that Hitler had lost his chance to seize power.66
Lockhart clearly came to admire both men and later wrote:
From 1929 to 1933 German journalism was strongly represented in London by a brilliant team of foreign correspondents. The brightest star was Ustinov, who not only had a remarkable flair, but also a penetrating mind, illuminated with a scintillating wit.67
CHAPTER 6: VANSITTART
Robert Gilbert Vansittart, born 25 June 1881, occupied third place on Hitler’s blacklist of Britons whose intransigence he blamed for the Second World War, after Winston Churchill and Leslie Hore-Belisha, the Jewish Minister of War who oversaw Britain’s belated drift to rearmament from 1937 to 1940. Even in 1942, in his Wolf’s Lair headquarters on the Eastern front, Hitler’s dinner table conversation turned to the supposed iniquities of these three opponents of appeasement.68
Vansittart’s family origins were in south-eastern Holland, near the German border, but the Vansittarts had been settled in Britain since 1670: merchant adventurers, administrators, admirals and generals, a director of the East India Company, and, in Nicholas Vansittart, Baron Bexley, a Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1812 to 1824. Nevertheless Vansittart’s hawkish features and slightly slanting eyes gave rise to rumours that he was of Asian or black lineage, which his detractors thought significant.
His father was an army captain who inherited substantial estates at Foots Cray in Kent. The income paid for Robert to be educated at Eton, where he excelled at languages and determined on a career in the diplomatic service. As a young man, he made extended visits to France and Germany that profoundly influenced his outlook. In Paris, at the time of the Dreyfus Affair, he was horrified by the violent anti-Semitism routinely practised. In Hamburg, during the Boer War, he suffered bullying and humiliation as a result of anti-British sentiments. Disappointed to be rejected for military service in the First World War, on account of his protected profession, he mourned bitterly the loss of his younger brother Arnold at Ypres in 1915. From 1916 he was secretary of the Prisoner of War department of the Foreign Office, inevitably concerned daily with allegations of German mistreatment of captives.69
In the 1920s his career had advanced rapidly: political secretary to Lord Curzon as Foreign Secretary; then private secretary to Conservative and Labour Prime Ministers, Stanley Baldwin and Ramsay MacDonald respectively. In 1930 he returned to the Foreign Office as permanent under-secretary, theoretically at least the most powerful figure in the diplomatic firmament, and from there he waged a personal and often lonely battle against appeasement for most of the next decade.
His first wife, Gladys, had died young and in 1931 he married Sarita, widow of his diplomatic colleague Sir Colville Barclay. The Vansittart family fortune had been dissipated by his father but his new wife was independently extremely wealthy and this enabled the new permanent under-secretary to entertain lavishly at his country mansion, Denham Place in Buckinghamshire, and at 44 Park Street, Mayfair, where the distinguishing feature was a curved first-floor ballroom. The guest list included King Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson, Churchill, and Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador.
Vansittart opposed a return to the pre-1914 diplomatic policy of alliances, incompatible secret treaties, balance of power bargaining and tariff wars. He feared they would undo whatever progress the League of Nations and disarmament policies had achieved. Over the next six y
ears Adolf Hitler would more than fulfil his worst vision.
Vansittart gathered around him a few rising younger men who became known as ‘Van’s Boys’. They were in broad agreement with his views about Germany and were prepared to go out on a limb for him, maintaining intelligence contacts, briefing anti-appeasement MPs like Churchill and well-disposed journalists. Apart from Clifford Norton, his two ablest props were Rex Leeper and Ralph Wigram.70
The Australian-born Leeper already had close connections to MI6. He had been an intelligence officer at the Ministry of Information in 1916 and taken a similar role at the Foreign Office in 1918. He was involved in setting up MI6’s operations in Poland and in negotiating the release of Robert Bruce Lockhart, the British consul in Moscow. From 1935 he was head of news at the Foreign Office, active in developing the use of propaganda; and in wartime became director of the Political Warfare Executive.71 Wigram had been on a secret mission in the Caucasus during the First World War, served as a diplomat in Washington and Paris, and overcame a bout of polio to become head of the Central department of the Foreign Office, directly responsible for reporting to Vansittart on developments in Germany. With Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald’s permission, Wigram also briefed his close friend Winston Churchill, at that time exiled to the back benches. He was also behind the leaking to the Daily Telegraph, in 1935, of details of the expansion of the Luftwaffe, which caused a political outcry.72
Vansittart’s private intelligence network was an eclectic mix of nationalities and occupations who shared a deep distrust of German militarist tendencies. Foremost among them was Group Captain Malcolm Christie, who had a First in chemistry from Cambridge, had worked for German industry before the First World War and had then been bitten by the flying bug in its very early days. He served in the Royal Flying Corps during the First World War and was air attaché in Washington and Berlin until retirement in 1930. In that time he had built up a significant range of contacts in Germany which he maintained from his home on the Dutch-German border. He was able to hold lengthy personal conversations with Hitler’s Air Minister, Hermann Göring, who could be expansively forthcoming about aircraft development and tactics, and tap into a range of well-placed sources in the aviation world. He was one of the first to reveal the rapidly increasing power of the Luftwaffe and predict Hitler’s military and political objectives.73
Vansittart’s return to the Foreign Office had coincided with the New York Stock Exchange collapse and the start of the Great Depression. In Britain, in 1931, that led to the schism of the Labour Party and the creation of a ‘national’ government in which Ramsay MacDonald was Prime Minister but Conservatives increasingly dominated. In Germany the collapse of a Social Democrat-led coalition was followed by substantial electoral gains for the Nazis and government by decree by Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, the devoutly Catholic leader of the Centre Party, through the aged President Hindenburg. Hitler consolidated his powerbase among industrialists and the army while his storm troopers gave the German public a foretaste of what was to come, directing their violence against opponents in general and Jews in particular.
Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany on the morning of 30 January 1933. Over the next twelve months the Nazification of Germany cumulatively destroyed Klop’s belief in his nationality. The man who had left London in 1914 to volunteer to fight for Germany, a country he barely knew but whose citizenship he cherished, in the First World War, became an outcast with no right to earn a living from his chosen career.
Klop was one of a number of German journalists who put their names to a letter to the Manchester Guardian which appeared, possibly by design, on 1 April 1933, declaring that a full-scale revolution was taking place in Germany and that at such time ‘incidents’ were inevitable. The correspondents warned that false rumours in the British press about alleged atrocities were reaching the level of psychosis and appealed for everyone ‘to avoid sensationalism, exaggeration and distortion’.
Later that month the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service meant state employees who were not of Aryan descent could be forced to retire. The law was extended progressively to teachers, doctors and other professions. In October the Reich Press Law made Aryan descent a requirement of journalism and obliged editors only to publish material that did not conflict with the interests of the State under its new leadership. In December the Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels absorbed the Wolff Bureau into his state-controlled German News Bureau.
This was part of the process of purging Jews from public life and quickly extended to other ethnic groups and classes perceived to be enemies of the regime. Nadia recognised the implications more clearly than Klop:
So life went on, rich and varied, until 1933 when the hideous shadow of Hitler loomed for the first time on our horizon. I was full of apprehension but Klop, being an optimist, believed that all would be well. He regarded Hitler as a complete nonentity and could not agree with me that his appearance portended disaster. However, slowly but surely our relations with the German embassy began to deteriorate.74
Klop had simultaneously become an employee of the state and rejected by it. The recently appointed head of Foreign Office propaganda in Berlin, Gottfried Aschmann, took immediate steps to move him from the sensitive London posting, where the Nazis were having trouble getting their message across, to Paris. The ambassador, Leopold von Hoesch, who was a constant thorn in Hitler’s side, successfully blocked it. On 18 May 1933 he wrote to Aschmann acknowledging that at a time of drastic decisions there was little time for personal issues. But the London embassy was already weak in representing German interests in a country of great importance. Ustinov had over many years mastered the control of the flow of news. He had good relationships in English circles and he knew whom to see and whom to trust. Hoesch went on to praise Klop’s knowledge in interpreting press coverage. A new man would be helpless in the face of these difficult tasks, particularly with the forthcoming world economic conference, intended to find solutions to the Great Depression, due in London in June.
Clearly Hoesch was already aware that Klop’s racial origins were being held against him because he felt the need to point out that, despite his Russian descent, Klop had volunteered to serve in the German Army, winning the Iron Cross, in the Great War. The fact that his wife was Russian was of negligible importance, he added.
Last but not least, Klop had a good relationship with Reuters and, for example, it was thanks to him that Hitler’s speech the previous day had been taken up so quickly and extensively in London.75
This was Hitler’s famous ‘Peace Speech’ to the Reichstag on 17 May which the historian William Shirer described as:
One of the greatest of his career, a masterpiece of deceptive propaganda that deeply moved the German people and unified them behind him and which made a profound and favourable impression on the outside world.
Hitler, responding to disarmament proposals by United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt, had spoken of renouncing all offensive weapons and disbanding Germany’s entire military establishment if neighbouring countries did the same. The moderation and peaceful language took the world by surprise. It disguised a condemnation of the Versailles Treaty and a warning that without equality of treatment Germany would withdraw from the disarmament conference and the League of Nations. The warning was overlooked as British newspapers, apparently prompted by Klop, blindly welcomed the new Führer’s initiative. The Times said Hitler’s claim for equality was irrefutable; the Daily Herald, official organ of the Labour Party, demanded that Hitler be taken at his word; the Tory-supporting Spectator called it a gesture of hope for a tormented world. Five months later, when the Allies failed to deliver immediate disarmament, Hitler carried out his threat. At the same time he dissolved the German Parliament, the Reichstag.76
So, for a while, Klop allowed himself to be absorbed into the London end of the new propaganda apparatus established by Joseph Goebbels. He quickly received a direct and salutary warning of what th
e future held.
In August 1933 the Wolff Bureau’s managing director, Artur Rawitski, set out from Berlin to visit Reuters in London, travelling on the German steam ship Reliance, bound for America. Before she reached Southampton the German police telegraphed the captain, ordering him to detain Rawitski on charges of embezzlement. On 9 August the captain left him in the custody of the British police and sailed on. By 9:30 p.m. Klop had got wind of what was happening and phoned the Resident Clerk at the Foreign Office, Geoffrey Wallinger, asking him to intervene. Three hours later Sir Roderick Jones, head of Reuters, added his voice to the protest, pointing out that Mr Rawitski was Jewish and might well be at risk of his life. A pantomime of activity ensued. Immigration officers could not be contacted; lawyers pondered and concluded that formal extradition procedures might not be required in such a case; the Home Office was consulted; and by mid-morning the next day pretty much everyone was satisfied that nothing could be done, which was just as well since the unfortunate Mr Rawitski had already been put on a German-bound ship and sailed away.