Robert Vansittart, 1st Baron Vansittart

Vansittart was suspicious of Adolf Hitler from the start and claimed that what Hitler said was "for foreign consumption". He thought Hitler would start another European war as soon as he "felt strong enough".[5]

Vansittart supported revising the Versailles Treaty in Germany's favour but only after Hitler was no longer in power. Vansittart believed that Britain should be firm with Germany, with an alliance between France and the Soviet Union against Germany essential. Vansittart also urgently advocated rearmament.[6]

In the summer of 1936, Vansittart visited Germany and claimed that he found a climate that "the ghost of Barthou would hardly have recognised" and that Britain should negotiate with Germany.[7] He thought that satisfying Hitler's "land hunger" at Soviet expense would be immoral and regarded the Franco-Soviet Treaty of Mutual Assistance as non-negotiable. It was because he believed that Germany had gained equality in Europe that Vansittart favoured facilitating German expansion in Africa.[7] He thought that Hitler was exploiting fears of a "Bolshevist menace" as a cover for "expansion in Central and South-Eastern Europe".[8]

Like Sir Maurice Hankey, Vansittart thought in power politics terms. He thought Hitler could not decide whether to follow Joseph Goebbels and Alfred von Tirpitz in viewing Britain as "the ultimate enemy" or on the other hand adopting the Joachim von Ribbentrop policy of appeasing Britain in order to engage in military expansion in the East.[8]

Vansittart thought that in either case time should be "bought for rearmament" by an economic agreement with Germany and by appeasing every "genuine grievance" about colonies.[8] Vansittart wanted to detach Benito Mussolini from Hitler and thought that the British Empire was an "Incubus" and that Continental Europe was the central British national interest, but he doubted whether agreement could be had there.[9] That was because he feared that German attention, if turned eastwards, would result in a military empire between the Baltic Sea, the Adriatic Sea and the Black Sea.[10]

At the Foreign Office in the 1930s, Vansittart was a major figure in the loose group of officials and politicians opposed to appeasement of Germany. Eden and Vansittart had already clashed during the Abyssinia Crisis with Eden supporting sanctions against Italy while Vansittart wanted Italy as an ally against Germany. Vansittart argued that there was no prospect of a "general settlement" with Hitler, and the best that could be done was to strengthen ties with the French in order to confront Germany.[11] Vansittart had supported Eden's efforts to defuse the Rhineland crisis as British rearmament had only just begun, but Vansittart urged the government to use the crisis as a chance to begin forming a military alliance with France against Germany.[12] By the spring of 1936, Vansittart had become convinced that a "general settlement" with Germany was not possible. A Foreign Office official Owen O'Malley suggested that Britain give Germany a "free hand in the East" (i.e. accept the German conquest of all Eastern Europe) in exchange for a German promise to accept the status quo in Western Europe.[13] Vansittart wrote in response that Hitler was seeking world conquest, and that to allow Germany to conquer all of Eastern Europe would give the Reich sufficient raw materials to make Germany immune to a British blockade, which would then allow the Germans to overrun Western Europe.[13] Vansittart commented that to allow Germany to conquer Eastern Europe would "lead to the disappearance of liberty and democracy in Europe".[13] By contrast, Eden saw British interests as confided only to Western Europe, and did not share Vansittart's beliefs about what Hitler's ultimate intentions might be.[13]

In spite of his harsh opposition to appeasement with Germany, Vansittart had been on "very friendly terms with Herr (Konrad) Henlein".[14] Henlein was the leader of the Sudeten German Party, which demanded autonomy for the Sudetenaland, as was eventually achieved through the Munich Agreement (1938). Vansittart genuinely liked Henlein, the mild-mannered and easy-going gymnastics teacher, and believed in assurances that all he wanted was autonomy for the Sudetenland.[15] Much of Vansittart's later turn towards Germanphobia was provoked by his discovery that Henlein had deceived him.[15]

Vansittart told Henlein that "no serious intervention in favour of the Czechs was to be feared from Great Britain and probably also from France."[16] That reached Hitler in the second half of 1937, when he was deciding about his plan to overthrow Austria and Czechoslovakia; his decisions were not proof of high intuition or intellect but were based on information received from Vansittart, among other well-placed politicians and officers in Britain, like Lord Lothian, Lord Mount Temple, Oliver Vaughan Gurney Hoare (Sir Samuel Hoare's younger brother) and others. It is not known how much that encouraged Hitler, but he later stated very similar views: "the Führer believed that almost certainly Britain and probably France as well, had already tacitly written off the Czechs and were reconciled to the fact that this question would be cleared up in due course by Germany."[17]

After the war, an effort was made to cover up Vansittart's embarrassing "real friendship" with Henlein.[18]

In the late 1930s, Vansittart together with Reginald Leeper, the Foreign Office's Press Secretary, often leaked information to a private newspaper, The Whitehall Letter, edited by Victor Gordon Lennox, the anti-appeasement diplomatic editor of the Daily Telegraph.[19]

That brought him into conflict with the political leadership at the time, and he was removed as Permanent Under-Secretary in 1938. A new post as "Chief Diplomatic Adviser to His Majesty's Government" was instead created ad hoc for him in which he served until 1941.[1]

Vansittart was also involved in intelligence work. In 1940, Vansittart sued the American historian Harry Elmer Barnes for libel for an article, written by Barnes in 1939, accusing him of then plotting aggression against Germany.[20]

During the war, Vansittart became a prominent advocate of a very anti-German line. His earlier worries about Germany were reformulated into an argument that Germany was intrinsically militaristic and aggressive. In Black Record: Germans Past and Present (1941), Vansittart portrayed Nazism as just the latest manifestation of Germany's continuous record of aggression from the time of the Roman Empire. Therefore, after Germany was defeated, it must be stripped of all military capacity, including its heavy industries. The German people enthusiastically supported Hitler's wars of aggression, just as they supported the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 and World War I in 1914. They must be thoroughly re-educated under strict Allied supervision for at least a generation. De-Nazification was not enough. The German military elite was the real cause of war, especially the "Prussianist" officer corps and the German General Staff: both must be destroyed. In 1943 he wrote:

In the opinion of the author, it is an illusion to differentiate between the German right, centre, or left, or the German Catholics or Protestants, or the German workers or capitalists. They are all alike, and the only hope for a peaceful Europe is a crushing and violent military defeat followed by a couple of generations of re-education controlled by the United Nations.[21]

He also wrote that "the other Germany has never existed save in a small and ineffective minority".[22] On other occasions, he made similar remarks:

We didn't go to war in 1939 to save Germany from Hitler ... or the continent from fascism. Like in 1914 we went to war for the not lesser noble cause that we couldn't accept a German hegemony over Europe.[23]

The British historian R. B. McCallum wrote in 1944: "To some, such as Lord Vansittart, the main problem of policy was to watch Germany and prevent her power reviving. No one can refuse him a tribute for his foresight in this matter."[24]

• Les Pariahs (1902)
• The Cap and Bells: a comedy in three acts (1913)
• Dusk (1914)
• Dead Heat: a comedy in three acts (1939)

• The Gates: A Study in Prose (1910)
• John Stuart (1912)
• Pity's Kin (1924)

• Black Record: Germans Past and Present (1941)
• Bones of Contention (1945)

• Songs & Satires (1909)
• Foolery: a comedy in verse (1912)
• The Singing Caravan, a Sufi Tale (1919)
• Tribute (1926)
• Green and Grey: Collected Poems (1944)

• Lessons of My Life (1943)
• The Mist Procession (1957), Hutchinson & Co. London (published posthumously with a prefatory note by his wife Sarita)