A third point upon which these three Europeans agreed was
that Herr Hitler's personal supremacy within the Third Reich had been enormously enhanced since September. At the time of Munich there was still a possibility that the General Staff would find sufficient support in Get many to be able to dismiss Ribbentrop and Himinler and to relegate the Fiihrer to the position of the Dalai Lama of Obersalzburg. No such possibility existed today. Public opinion had been rallied by the spectre of encirclement and the army was being rapidly gleichgeschaltet into supine obedience to Nazi dynamism.
These three axioms, therefore, were accepted by my foreign friends : (a) that Hitler did not desire a major war; (b) that he believed he could achieve his ambitions by lulling Great Britain into passivity until the moment came when he could strike her down; (c) that he had now regained absolute ascendancy over the army and the German public and that therefore any hope of some internal movement against him was a dangerous illusion. They agreed also upon the conclusion to be drawn from these axioms. It was this. The only possible hope of preventing a major war was to convince Herr Hitler that any further act of aggression would (however great might be its initial success) bring the whole might of this country into a war against him. It was no good at all our trying either to explain away encirclement or to offer appeasement: the German people were absolutely convinced that the Miichte der Erneuerung (namely those Powers, such as Germany and Italy and Japan, who are aiming at " renewal ") are bound to obtain supremacy over the Miichte der Beharrung, namely the conservative Powers wfio desire only to retain what they have got. Their one doubt is whether Great Britain is to be classed in the first or the second categories, whether she is static or dynamic. In spite of Herr von Ribbentrop and his memories of Mayfair drawing-rooms, they are not absolutely convinced as yet that the British lion is thoroughly dead. Our only hope is to display our vitality. If by some sharp, strong gesture of defiance we could disprove the legend of our decadence, then we might shake Herr Hitler's confidence in the Bismarckian qualities of Herr von Ribbentrop. Great Britain hitherto had been paralysed by fear of seeming provocative: it was time for us to realise that only by risking provocation could we serve as a deterrent.
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