The Charge' d'Affaires in Great Britain to the Foreign Ministry - Details on the present political situation
Source: Documents on German Foreign Policy, vol. IV, p.1139. A684
LONDON, February 14, 1936. III E 561
Received February 17. Subject: Details on the present political situation. I lunched today with a member of one of the Embassies here who is, in general, very well informed and who gave me various interesting details about the present political situation which I set forth below. My acquaintance began by confirming that all his own impressions, too, went to show that relations between Russia and Britain had very considerably improved during the last few weeks. Russia, he said, was looked upon nowadays by Britain as a State whose attitude was purely one of defence and who desired nothing other than not to be exposed to attack from any quarter, and that therefore Russia was acting in conformity with the British view of the need to avoid all violent convulsions in international affairs. One of the chief milestones on the road to a Russo-British rapprochement was the Treaty of Friendship which had meanwhile been signed between the five Powers of the Near East, that is Turkey, Iraq, Persia, Afghanistan and Saudi-Arabia. Since Turkey conducted her policy completely in accordance with Russian desires and since Iraq's policy was being determined in London, this Treaty of Friendship was proved to be in accord with the policies of these two Great Powers. As far as the situation in the Far East was concerned, he did not believe Britain's rapprochement with Russia should be interpreted so widely as to mean that she had already adopted a definite attitude against Japan. He thought that the British would continue trying to maintain good relations with Japan, and thus he judged British policy in this sphere to be more a matter of establishing a "balance of power" in the Far East, which would leave it open to Britain to put her money on either Japan or Russia according as matters might develop in the Far East. He too was not expecting any positive results from Litvinov's conversations in the country, though he said that on the other hand it was, of course, a fact that Litvinov had been given a very friendly reception here by everybody and that, in other respects too, there were a number of indications of a lasting improvement in mutual relations. My informant claimed to know that Litvinov had put three precise questions to Eden during his conversation with him, namely, what attitude the British Government would adopt in the three following contingencies: a remilitarization of the Rhineland by Germany, a German invasion of Austria, and a German attack on Czechoslovakia. In his replies, Eden, as regards the first question, had confined himself to a juridical definition: as concerns the other two, he had drawn attention to the Covenant of the League of Nations. My informant said that Britain's chief concern at present was German rearmament and that there could be no doubt that Britain's relatively friendly attitude towards Germany last autumn during the severe Anglo-Italian crisis had today, one might almost say, gone into reserve. The British press bore eloquent witness to this, but he could also assure me that in Parliamentary and Foreign Office circles there was strong feeling against Germany. Britain would now start rearming on a very large scale and there was certainly no doubt that Parliamentary would approve the Government proposals. But these developments were not particularly agreeable to the British Government, since they spelt the doom of their hopes of winning national popularity through tax reductions. He would not yet go so far as to speak of a deliberate British policy of encirclement against Germany, but no one could doubt that the British attitude towards Germany was unfriendly. The way the question of colonies had been dealt with during the last few weeks had also shown clearly enough how little inclination there was here to accommodate Germany; for ideas, such as had been developed by Sir Samuel Hoare in his Geneva speech, about giving other countries access to the raw material areas of the world had in the event already proved to be no more than sound and smoke, whilst the whole upshot of the matter to date was to establish that Government and Parliament were at one in proclaiming the view that not a single square yard of British colonial territory could be ceded. No one should be led to entertain any false hopes in this respect by the speeches of a few left-wing politicians in Germany. In conclusion, my informant gave me the following particulars concerning the Mediterranean agreement against Italy. Turkey had tried to induce the British Government to convert the agreement, which had been designed to cover only the League of Nations conflict with Italy, into a permanent Mediterranean pact. But the British had taken the line that, desirable as such a pact might be, it could not be made without including Italy. As regards the statements made by my acquaintance about the unfavourable feeling prevailing towards Germany, I may observe that this provides clear evidence of the impression which the campaign conducted by the British press against Germany in the past few weeks must have made on every observer of the political scene in this country. If members of the German Embassy are told by the British Foreign Office that nothing is further from the minds of the British Government that the pursuit of an anti-German policy, then this attitude, at least at the moment, is still blossoming very much unseen. But it is, at the same time, gratifying to note that the attitude of the British press has certainly calmed down considerably in the last couple of days and it can only be hoped that this will last.
