Germans Against Hitler
FABIAN VON SCHLABRENDORFF began fighting Nazism as a legal student at the universities oF Halle and Berlin. During the war he took an intimate part in the plans to assassinate Hitler which culminated on July 20, 1944: He only escaped, after torture, with his life from the Gestapo thereafter as a result of a chapter of accidents. He is deeply concerned to defend his associates in the German opposition to Nazism against the less worthy comments of those Anglo- Saxon best-sellers, Sir John Wheeler-Bennett and William Shirer. In the changing climate of opinion towards Germany in this country, it is likely that he will get the hearing he deserves. His is by no means a weak case, and there is a good deal less special pleading in it than in the works of those he criticises. Much of his book covers old ground in its account of the fate of the wartime conspiracy and is interest- ing mainly for its quality of actuality. But his account of the degree of opposition which was possible before 1939 will surprise many. Though his own brand of conservatism in the aristocratic tradition is very alien to British experience.
For most of the Hitler era, from 1932 to 1943, Ivan Maisky was Soviet Ambassador in London. Few Soviet diplomatists of that period survived, let alone were allowed to publish their memoirs. Yet this is Mr Maisky's fourth volume. The per- sonality which emerges from his pages is in many respects so unpleasant (these notebooks read like the private diaries of a conceitedly over- clever left-wing public-school intellectual), that one turns with relief and doubled interest to the picture painted of him by Signor Quaroni, who also served as Ambassador in London for Italy in the years 1961-64, and met Maisky during his period as Ambassador in Moscow.
Maisky, writes Quaroni, shows the 'well- ordered mind of a studious, intelligent man. His long diplomatic experience, and his own situa- tion, which had not always been easy, had en- dowed him with a certain varnish of scepticism and caution.' Every so often, however, he re- vealed 'political beliefs and an idealism which were almost naive.' Maisky, he explains, was a Social Democrat and by no means pro-Bolshevik at the time of the 1917 Revolution and had. in fact, been involved in one of the regionA anti- Bolshevik governments. He owed his advance in the Soviet diplomatic service entirely to Litvinov. the Soviet Foreign Minister. How he survived T.itvinov's removal, the purges and the Nazi- Soviet pact we shall probably never know: now that the lefs-be-bcast!y-to-Stalin mood is fading
in Russia, Mr Maisky, whose memoirs have recently been attacked in Russia, will certainly never tell us.
Maisky was, says Quaroni, overwhelmingly concentrated on the idea of co-operation with Britain; and as Anglo-Soviet relations worsened in 1945, he lost his position as Vice-Commissar for Foreign Affairs and slid into obscurity. It is tempting to see in his Spanish Notebooks and its predecessor the bitterness of a disappointed lover. For both are filled with bilious sketches of his British opposite numbers, and the usual crude propaganda references to sinister back-stage eco- nomic pressures on them.
All the same, the Spanish Notebooks provide a fascinating whiff of the Left Book Clubman's view of the 1930s. They reproduce the authentic muddleheadedness of the Popular Front over ends, means and priorities involved in the war in Spain. Everyone knew that the Germans and Italians were giving military aid to Franco. Everyone knew that the Spanish government could keep going only if it were offered equiva- lent aid in arms, training cadres, tanks and air- craft from other sources. Everyone, including the Soviets, knew that if that aid were seriously given, there would be the utmost danger of a war be- tween France and Italy happening not by design but by accident. Hitler knew it. It was the main thing he counted on in 1937 to make it possible for him to grab Austria and Czechoslovakia ahead of schedule (in fact, the Western demo- cracies proved so weak that he managed the grab without a Mediterranean war to distract them). It was the main reason he kept the war going.
Maisky knew it too : just as he knew the whole ridiculous farce of the Non-Intervention Com- mittee was based on the idea that ridicule was better than a European war. Yet his notebooks make it clear that by 1937 the main Soviet effort on the Committee was devoted to thwarting its efforts and trying to cause its breakdown. Why? Some argue that Stalin's aim was similar to Hitler's. He wanted war to come out of Spain. But Stalin was much less active in foreign affairs at this time than he was to be later. In 1936-37 he had his hands full with the purges and the second Five-Year Plan. Litvinov was still in power; and Litvinov seems genuinely to have sought collective security as a means of avoid- ing war. As Maisky recounts the debating suc- cesses he scored at the Non-Intervention Committee, sometimes at the Italian, Grandi's, expense, sometimes at Ribbentrop's, more often at the expense of the unfortunate chairman, the Earl of Plymouth, one wonders if Quaroni's diagnosis is not the correct one, and if the basic naivety of Maisky's character is not yet again showing through.
It is, however, not only for his portrait of Maisky that Signor Quaroni's series of sketches deserves to be read. In his career he met General Pershing, Weizmann, Malchno, the Cossack anarchist. Lunacharsky, Bevin, Tito, Stalin, Evita Peron and many others. He has a series of superb sketches of Albania under King Zog- pure Eric Ambler in places. There is a most perceptive sketch of one of India's last Viceroys; and a most informative piece on the famous Stresa conference of 1935, at which Mussolini was not warned what might happen if he attacked Abyssinia. The final sketch is a most sympathetic one of M Antoine Pinay, who has not had many defenders in Britain. Like all Signor Quaroni's pen portraits, it is individual, personal and yet intrudes very little of his own personality. M Maisky's valuable memoirs would make pleasanter reading for a little of these qualities:
D. C. WATT
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