by Peter Day
Sir Robert Vansittart, when he heard what had happened, was apoplectic. Did the Home Office and the immigration service never read the newspapers? Had they no idea what fate was likely to await Mr Rawitski? Was it not the case that an allegation of embezzlement was among the simplest to fabricate? Surely nothing would have been lost by delaying Rawitski’s return for a couple of days while the case was investigated. His mood cannot have been lightened by a report from the British embassy in Berlin, which could discover no definite news of Mr Rawitski but explained:
Probably his Semitic blood and democratic principles constitute his crime … We should imagine that he will disappear into a concentration camp without the formality of any ‘proceedings’.
Vansittart’s Assistant Secretary, Sir George Mounsey, was still able to comment disdainfully that ‘all’s well that end ends well’ – a reference not to Mr Rawitski’s unknown fate but to the fact that Parliament was not sitting so no MP could ask awkward questions about him.77
MI5 still regarded Klop with some suspicion. At the beginning of December 1933 Sir Vernon Kell, the security service’s director, wrote a nine-page report for Sir Robert Vansittart at the Foreign Office on the Nazi propaganda drive in Britain. Kell dwelt mainly on Albert Rosenberg, editor of the party newspaper, who had just paid a notably unsuccessful visit to Britain. He laid a wreath bearing a swastika at the tomb of the unknown warrior in Westminster Abbey and an outraged British veteran threw it in the Thames. Kell warned also of the activities of Joachim von Ribbentrop, later ambassador to Britain, and Otto Bene, London leader of the Nazi party whose hectoring demands that Germans living in Britain should support the party were already viewed with alarm.
Towards the end of his report Kell added a couple of paragraphs about Klop:
Representative of the Wolff Bureau, who has a salary of £70 a month, although not fully in favour with the Nazis because of his Jewish wife, is reported now to be doing a certain amount of propaganda work on behalf of the present regime. He seems for a time to have given a number of champagne dinner parties and generally to have spent money beyond his apparent means.
Aside from the inaccuracy about Nadia – who was certainly not Jewish – and an underestimate of Klop’s secret salary, Kell summed up Klop’s lifestyle and finances well enough. He went on to make other remarks which unfortunately have been removed from the official Foreign Office record by the simple expedient of cutting off the bottom of the page on which they appeared. In any case, Kell’s doubt about where Klop’s sympathies lay were directly contradicted in a handwritten note by diplomat Victor Perowne who had his own sources of information from a high ranking German Nazi. This source described Klop as ‘a very dangerous man with wrong ideas. Very bad for Germany.’78
The source went on to say that Count Albrecht von Bernstorff had been removed from his position as Secretary at the German embassy in London because he was too friendly with Ustinov and too much under his influence. This was a fairly startling assessment – Bernstorff was one of the most scornful critics of the Nazi regime. A blond giant of a man, he was a familiar, stylish figure arriving at London’s best restaurants and clubs in his open-topped Armstrong Siddeley. He was an Anglophile, of liberal convictions, who had been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. The retired diplomat and diarist Harold Nicolson recorded a lunch he attended in August 1932 at The Elms, in Rottingdean, Kent, the home of the head of Reuters, Sir Roderick Jones and his wife Enid Bagnold, the novelist. Among the other guests was the Labour politician and former Attorney General, William Jowitt, and Simone de la Chaume, the French amateur golf champion who married tennis player René Lacoste and founded the sports fashion label, as were Bernstorff and Ustinov. After a good luncheon Klop amused them with imitations of Queen Victoria.79
Bernstorff was particularly fond of Enid Bagnold and took pleasure in introducing her to his friends, including Klop. The two men of such contrasting size were nicknamed Big Pig and Little Pig. They seem to have made it their business both to entertain and to warn of the impending Nazi menace. Enid Bagnold was an admirer of Hitler, despite her two friends’ protestations and on one occasion invited Klop, Nadia and the teenage Peter Ustinov to a dinner in honour of Hermann von Raumer, Ribbentrop’s foreign policy adviser. The devoted Nazi, boasting of the New Germany’s efficiency, explained: ‘I only have to press my bottom (meaning button) and four policemen come running.’ The young Peter Ustinov burst into a fit of giggles and had to be escorted from the room on the instructions of a distinctly unamused Sir Roderick Jones.80
It was probably through the Bernstorff and Bagnold social circle that Klop and Nadia got to know Lord Strathcona, undersecretary at the War Office and Captain of the King’s Bodyguard. Nadia became friends with his wife Diana and taught her to paint during a holiday at the Stratchcona family seat on the Hebridean island of Colonsay. When war broke out Nadia helped Diana run an emergency canteen at Euston station.
Bernstorff’s aristocratic lineage and unstuffy attitude opened up a wide social circle to which Klop also had access. Winston Churchill’s controversial cousin Clare Sheridan was among them. She was a sculptress who had been commissioned to create busts of leaders of the Russian revolution and espoused their Communist creed, scandalising her friends, and agents of MI5 who had her under surveillance, with her advocacy of free love. William Jowitt and his wife Lesley were also close friends and patrons of the arts. They commissioned the Russian mosaic artist Boris Anrep to decorate the entrance hall to their Mayfair home with a series entitled Various Moments in the Life of a Lady of Fashion in which Lesley Jowitt was shown in bed on the telephone, in her bath and at a nightclub.81
Bernstorff’s Establishment friends included British diplomats, newspaper editors, bankers and academics and he liked to enjoy himself, too. He and Klop were no strangers to the London nightclub circuit. Bernstorff spent at least one Christmas with the Ustinov family and invited them for holidays on his country estate on the island of Stintenberg in the Schaalsee east of Hamburg.
Harold Nicolson was a frequent dining companion of Bernstorff’s. When the count was forced to relinquish his diplomatic position, Nicolson attended a farewell lunch organised by Enid Bagnold and attended by the author H. G. Wells, who was on the brink of becoming engaged to Klop’s friend, Moura Budberg. Nicolson’s diaries record a 1936 dinner at the Savoy Grill with Bernstorff, Winston Churchill and Duff Cooper where they discussed how Hitler might be stopped. Bernstorff recommended ‘overwhelming encirclement’ and Nicolson wrote: ‘He is extremely courageous and outspoken in his hatred of the Nazis, and I fear he is not long for this world.’82
It was Bernstorff who suggested to an English friend that instead of sending Chamberlain, Eden or Lloyd George to treat with Hitler they should send a sergeant of the Brigade of Guards who would say to him: ‘Corporal, stand up when you speak to me,’ and Hitler would do as he was ordered.83
A year later Nicolson was pondering how he might get Bernstorff an invitation to shoot at Sandringham so that he could get his message across to King George VI. Bernstorff maintained his very public opposition to Hitler, defiantly returning to Germany to join the board of a German Jewish bank and sheltering Jewish refugees. He was arrested in 1943 for plotting against the regime, suffered terrible torture in Ravensbrück concentration camp and was eventually executed a couple of weeks before the end of the war, apparently on Ribbentrop’s orders. This was particularly painful for Klop and Nadia, after their years of friendship, because of a misplaced attempt by Klop to protect him. Shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War, Klop was in Switzerland and bumped into his old adversary Andre Rostin who, despite his Jewish background, was still working for the Germans. Rostin began to ask questions about Bernstorff and, hoping to deflect an interrogation that he feared could only bring his friend harm, Klop assured the questioner that Bernstorff was in reality a good Nazi. Not long after, he received a mortified letter from Bernstorff reproaching Klop for so blatantly misrepresenting Bernstorff’s beliefs. It was
the last they heard from him.84
At the beginning of April 1933, MI5 had taken the opportunity to take a close look at the new Nazi regime. Captain Guy Liddell, a former police Special Branch officer and deputy director of counter-intelligence, was sent to Berlin, ostensibly to examine a vast cache of subversive Communist literature found in a raid on their massive headquarters, Karl Liebknecht House, a former factory building on the Bülowplatz. Liddell had led the British raid on the Arcos building, headquarters of the Russian trade delegation, at 49 Moorgate in the City of London in 1927. It had produced embarrassingly little evidence of a Communist conspiracy, had been justified in Parliament by revealing information from secret sources and caused the rupture of diplomatic relations between Britain and Russia. Liddell approached his new assignment with a healthy dose of scepticism and the clear expectation that it would reveal more about his Nazi hosts than their Communist enemies.
Liddell was greeted by MI6’s man in Berlin, Major Frank Foley. His report went to Clifford Norton in the Foreign Office, Sir Hugh ‘Quex’ Sinclair, head of MI6, and to Sir Russell Scott, permanent under-secretary at the Home Office.
Liddell got straight to the point, describing their first contact with Dr Ernst ‘Putzi’ Hanfstaengel, Hitler’s personal friend, gifted pianist, financial backer and foreign press liaison officer:
He has travelled a good deal, but his appreciation of foreign affairs and of the psychology of foreign peoples has become somewhat warped by his enthusiasm for the present regime. He is quite unbalanced both on the question of Communism and the Jews and genuinely believes the stories put about concerning the imminence of a Communist rising before Hitler’s accession to power, the burning of the Reichstag and the ‘International Jewish Conspiracy’ … He is under the erroneous impression that Communism is a movement controlled by the Jews … I did my best to explain that conditions in England were very different and that violent and indiscriminate action against any section of the community in Germany was bound to be misunderstood in England, and produce unfavourable comment.85
This wry, forensic dissection of his host was surely also intended to twist the noses of a number of people in positions of influence at the Foreign Office and beyond, who were at that time full of admiration for Herr Hitler’s energetic National Socialism and inclined to think that Sir Oswald Mosley might achieve something similar in Britain. It was typical of the man who was in many ways the embodiment of John le Carré’s fictional spy chief George Smiley: a holder of the Military Cross from his service with the Royal Field Artillery in the First World War, he gave up a promising career as a cellist; endured a painful break-up of his marriage to Calypso Baring; successfully countered Communist and Nazi subversion in equal measure but eventually resigned his position as deputy director of MI5 because of an unwise friendship with the defector Guy Burgess. Long before that, he had overseen the embryonic career of Klop Ustinov.
Despite his misgivings, he got on well with Hanfstaengel, who perhaps understood foreigners better than Liddell imagined. When he fell out of favour with Hitler a couple of years later it was to Britain that he turned for asylum, moving next to Canada and then to Washington where he became an adviser to the US government in the Second World War.
Liddell’s report continued almost with a sense of disbelief as he explained that public reports that the Communists had been on the verge of armed insurrection, planning to use a network of tunnels spreading out from Karl Liebknecht House, were complete fiction. He reported on Nazi intelligence services; the assassination of political enemies; and ‘amply confirmed’ rumours that the Nazis were behind the Reichstag fire, as an excuse for wholesale repression of Jews and Communists. Liddell had drawn up a list of police contacts, who he hoped might prove useful in the future, and had a meeting with Ribbentrop, whose star was rising and whom Liddell found more amenable to reasoned discussion than most of the party faithful.
In 1935 the personal crisis finally engulfed Klop. According to Nadia, the Nazi regime had been treating him with growing suspicion and animosity, while he was boiling with rage and contempt. He was finally required to submit documentary evidence of his Aryan forebears – manifestly impossible given his part-Ethiopian mother and Slavic Russian father, let alone the grandfather who was a Polish Jew converted to Protestantism. He responded to the challenge with breathtaking audacity and an almost cavalier disregard not only for his own safety but that of his wife and family: ‘If Herr Dr Goebbels would like first to prove his ancestry, then I will do the same.’86
This was more than an act of gross insubordination. Klop would have been well aware that the propaganda chief, although of working-class Germanic parentage, was far from the image of the physically perfect Aryan athlete. He was short, dark and walked with a limp as a result of a childhood illness. His wife Magda, the epitome of a statuesque blonde, had a Jewish stepfather.
Sympathetic staff in the embassy and in Berlin tried to cover up Klop’s ‘faux pas’ but it was never likely to be ignored. He was ordered to return to Berlin for ‘consultations’, which he wisely refused to do. Then he was threatened with dismissal. He knew he would have to leave but the greatest danger was for Nadia, who was at the time in Berlin visiting her sister Olia and having a minor operation. Klop phoned and told her to come home immediately. Within days of her return Klop was sacked.
He was leaving an embassy more in sympathy with him than with their political masters in Berlin. As his Nazi-inclined successor Fritz Hesse recalled, the ambassador Leopold von Hoesch was no admirer of Hitler and treated the new press attaché with suspicion. Klop had been on intimate terms with the Foreign Office and popular in the highest English social circles. His departure had cut off a very important thread for the embassy.87
Hoesch died suddenly, of a heart attack, in 1936. He left behind in the embassy others of a like mind: the military attaché Leo Geyr von Schweppenburg and the Second Secretary in charge of consular affairs, Wolfgang zu Putlitz, who became Klop’s most prolific source of information.
CHAPTER 7: EXILES
Although Klop had clung on tenaciously to his position in the German embassy he had surreptitiously made plans for his departure and had already applied for British citizenship. With the help of Vansittart, the official notice of his intention appeared in a Welsh language newspaper where it would not attract the attention of the German authorities. Some people, among them Sir Roderick Jones at Reuters, declined to sponsor his citizenship, fearing to give offence to the Hitler regime.88 It was finally issued on 21 November 1935, signed by the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Home Office, Sir Russell Scott. Four days later Klop went to Markham House in Kings Road, Chelsea and before solicitor G. F. Wilkins swore ‘by Almighty God that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to His Majesty, King George the Fifth, His Heirs and Successors, according to law’.89
He had been a German for one week short of forty-three years and served his country valiantly. For the next twenty-seven years he was avowedly British. His determination to adopt the mores of his new nationality made him reticent about aspects of his own past. Peter Ustinov came home from school in October 1935 to find his father in tears over Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia. What surprised him more than the tears was the open admission by Klop of his own ancestry. Previously he had suppressed this knowledge for fear that ‘a touch of the tar-brush’ might make him socially unacceptable.90 He was similarly disinclined to refer to his Jewish antecedents.
At first his new country scarcely laid out the red carpet. He had no job, no prospects and no way to make ends meet. He and Nadia spent several weeks on holiday in the South of France mulling over their future while Clifford and Peter Norton looked after the fourteen-year-old Peter Ustinov. Their change in circumstances meant that he could no longer board at Westminster School, although he continued as a day boy, doing his best to antagonise his fellow pupil Rudolf von Ribbentrop. To afford the fees, the Ustinovs had to give up their flat in Lexham Gardens, Kensington and move to a three-r
oom apartment at 34 Redcliffe Gardens in Chelsea. Even then, Peter always suspected that the school had overlooked a number of unpaid bills. He felt that Klop simply refused to recognise that he was now poor and behaved instead like a rich man without any money, searching his pockets for non-existent assets and then going shopping anyway and inviting people to dinner.91
Klop tried his hand at anything that might make money. He became bookkeeper to the theatre impresario André Charlot. In his heyday, Charlot’s West End revues had helped launch the careers of Beatrice Lillie, Jack Buchanan, Gertrude Lawrence and Jessie Matthews but by the time Klop joined him he was struggling to escape from bankruptcy and reduced to staging round-the-clock semi-nude shows in Soho. The appointment did not last long.92 He tried his hand at writing short stories, but could not get them published, and served briefly as the art critic of the News Chronicle where his views on modern art were too acerbic and he was sacked.
Peter Ustinov, still at daggers drawn with his father, admits to a pang of sympathy for the humiliation Klop clearly felt at his inability to earn a living. Unfortunately this resentment manifested itself in outbursts of anger interspersed with periods of sullen withdrawal and denunciations of his teenage son for laziness when his school reports revealed a lack of academic prowess. In due course Nadia would come to Peter’s rescue by recognising that her son’s talents lay elsewhere and encouraging him, much against Klop’s wishes, to move at the age of sixteen to the London Theatre Studio drama school in Islington run by Michael Saint-Denis, for whom she had worked on set design.93. Saint-Denis’s other protégés included Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Alec Guinness and Michael Redgrave. Nadia financed Peter’s theatre apprenticeship from the sale of paintings or from savings scrimped from house-keeping money. Encouragement for Peter’s dramatic inclinations came not from Klop but from his great uncle Alexander Benois who wrote to him: