In Europe

one could get in war by simply tossing conventional mores overboard, also based his foreign policy on a game of bluff with the diplomats. The occupation of the Rhineland and the annexation of the Sudetenland were typical political successes made possible only by Hitler's extraordinary cheek and aggression.
    ‘Munich is always seen as the best example of that, but Hitler later stated that Munich was one of his biggest mistakes. He should have eschewed all compromises in autumn 1938, he felt afterwards, and gone to war immediately. At that point the other world powers were not nearly prepared, and he would have obtained an overwhelming head start.
    ‘Behind the scenes in Munich, my father did everything in his power to help draft a treaty which would preserve the peace. He maintained very close contacts with the British and Italian ambassadors. In the endthey were able to slip Mussolini a proposed compromise, which formed the basis for the Munich Agreement later, during the summit with Hitler, Daladier and Chamberlain. Joachim von Ribbentrop, the former champagne dealer who became minister of foreign affairs and my father's boss, was furious. It had all been done behind his back. In my father's eyes, Chamberlain's ‘Peace in our time!’ was a perfectly legitimate claim. Later he said: ‘Munich was the last happy day in my life.’
    ‘Then, despite the promises made in Munich, Germany invaded Czechoslovakia. That was followed by the very last series of extensive negotiations to prevent a war over Poland, but my father had the feeling he had failed even before they began. During those days he took all kinds of steps which, had they been made public, would probably have resulted in his being tried for treason. On any number of occasions he told diplomat friends of his: “You people need to act now. You have to rob Hitler of the illusion that he can go on without the rest of the world intervening. You need to send a general to Germany, and let him pound on the table to show that this has to end.” As it was, when Britain declared war on Germany in early September 1939 it came as a complete surprise to Hitler and Ribbentrop.
    ‘That's why, when they accused my father later in Nuremberg of having helped prepare a war of aggression, nothing could have been further from the truth. He and a few of his colleagues had actually done everything they could to prevent a war.
    ‘So why did he go on working for years for the Nazi regime? Well … you know, one never stops widening one's awareness. So much has been written about that since. My father was a top official, and he must have been privy to a great deal. Even though his own information and his imagination could not fathom a thing like the Holocaust, when you read the documents he saw and signed back then you can only conclude that he must have known enough to draw conclusions for himself. He saved – and this has been proven – a great many people, and he must have known about the crimes against the Jews. But when the whole, terrible truth about Auschwitz became known in 1945, he was just as horrified by it as I was, as a young soldier. He wasn't really aware of the full scope of the Holocaust, I am convinced of that.
    ‘The only reason why he stayed put, I believe, was the hope that at a certain point he could exert a positive influence on Germany's foreignpolicies. At first he believed he might be able to prevent the outbreak of war, later he thought he could stop the attack on the Soviet Union. Most historians agreed about that later on: one of them even wrote that my father tried ‘with appropriate determination and cunning’ to prevent the war.
    ‘I've read a great deal about that period, but one never finds out everything. There is one thing, however, of which I am sure: I knew my father well, the way he really was. And I also know that an injustice was done to the essence of that man, there in Nuremberg.
    ‘I myself went to Potsdam in 1938 to enter military service. I was eighteen at the time. Things there were run – I was assigned to a machine-gunners’ company in the 9th Infantry Regiment – according to the old-fashioned Prussian model, not according to the National Socialist one. The Nazis were a very different brand of people. Just as in the diplomatic corps, great tensions arose between the
Wehrmacht
and the Nazis. Most of the officers were pleased that a strong Germany army was being created again, but they thought the Nazis were pathological