Through 1936, it could be said that Hitler's foreign policy had been pretty close to flawless. There had been one success after another. However, in 1937, very, very, very, severe problems began to develop in Hitler's plans and this is the key part of what we are to discuss in this lecture.
The first major disaster was the decision to send Joachim von Ribbentrop to England as the German ambassador. There was some logic to do this. Ribbentrop spoke fluent English. He had theoretically been very successful in producing two huge triumphs for Germany in relationship to England. One was the negotiation of the Anglo-German naval agreement in 1935. The second was the hugely successful visit of Britain's Prime Minister during World War I,
Lloyd George to Germany in 1936. This was just a total success.
Lloyd George was tremendously impressed with Hitler, and wrote a series of very favorable articles about Hitler in the British press when he returned to England. No one will really know the answer to some of these questions. Some have speculated that Ribbentrop's success was more due to some very talented people on his staff. We don't really know. What we do know is that his mission to England was one of the most disastrous foreign policy missions in world history.
In England, there were powerful forces that were highly sympathetic to Nazi Germany. Among them was King Edward VIII. The king himself, who later became the Duke of Windsor, who was highly sympathetic to Nazi Germany. Now, obviously it was a major setback when he was forced to resign because of the famous affair with Mrs. Simpson and so on and so forth. But that is symbolic of the level of support that Germany had in England. Unfortunately, Ribbentrop had a totally poisonous personality and basically alienated and/or made a fool out of himself in terms of British support for Germany there is no way to really overestimate the damage that this did, and the opportunity that was lost here.
One reason this fact is not fully appreciated by a lot of historians is that obviously, after World War II people who had been very sympathetic to Germany in the 1930s didn't really want to publicize that fact in their memoirs, and of course, Ribbentrop himself was executed rather quickly after the war. An interesting aspect of Germany's vision and its purpose in terms of negotiating with England was the very frank discussion between Ribbentrop and Churchill in 1937. And it could be seen as the manner in which Germany was presenting its vision to England and is duplicated in many other conversations.
Specifically, Ribbentrop openly told Churchill that Germany was planning to invade the Soviet Union, and sought neutrality with England. This was very up-front. So the big picture is very apparent for what Germany was planning to do: a nonaggression pact with England was verging on a life-and-death issue for Nazi Germany, because without it, they would face the prospect of a war on two fronts. The war on two fronts that destroyed the Kaiser's Germany.
Now, Ribbentrop left England a very bitter man. Ribbentrop was the kind of person who was incompetent in his field of work - foreign policy - but an absolute genius in terms of manipulating the power structure in which he worked. There are lots of people like this in politics and such people are usually very vain, and Ribbentrop was a very vain man. And he left England with a huge sense of bitterness about - from his point of view - of being humiliated by the British. And he returned to Germany as Foreign Minister with a pathological hatred of the British, and this would have very, very serious consequences for Germany's relationship with England.
Now, another thing that happened with Ribbentrop - which in fairness was not his fault - was that during, as he was leaving England, he was at a going away party with the leaders of the British government. During, and other people in the German government probably with a great deal of good judgment had made sure that Ribbentrop knew absolutely nothing about the plans for the Anschluss. So, when Chamberlain and the other British leaders asked about what was going on he emphatically told them that there were no plans for an Anschluss. This would also have very negative consequences because it would lead the British to believe that they could not trust Ribbentrop, and so the whole situation was just an unmitigated disaster and set the stage for problems to come.
Now, the other disaster in 1937 concerned the outbreak of war between Germany's two key allies in Asia, Japan and China, which will be discussed in the next lecture.