The Bedbug (10 page)

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 years 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 the 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.

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.
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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.’
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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.
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