Abstract
The practice of diplomacy has always relied on secret transactions and secretive individuals, those who occupied official postings and consular positions as well as those who operated behind the scenes, some of whom were public figures but were mostly shadowy private individuals greasing the wheels of international relations. Before and during the First World War go-betweens dashed from royal courts to political salons to broker deals and establish better understanding through their private channels, which was not in itself surprising during the ‘war of the cousins’. However, the presence and influence of unofficial diplomatic operators was all the more problematic in the aftermath of the First World War, and especially as public pressure was brought to bear to democratize international relations, supported by the machinery of and idealism for the League of Nations. Alas, Woodrow Wilson’s vision for the post-war world of diplomatic transparency ‘would become a pious wish’ (p. 127). Go Betweens for Hitler demonstrates just how idealistic and divorced from reality were the aspirations and principles of the new diplomacy, and what Urbach offers in this gripping and highly readable account of go-betweens is a rare insight into the unofficial side of diplomacy. This is one of the first studies to unmask these mainly royal and aristocratic (or nouveau aristocratic) operators whose dealings were dependent on their upper-class mobility and their connections since birth, and by dint of birth, to the leading families and power-brokers in multiple states.
Historians of the twentieth century have too often been averse to or suspicious of studying old elites in the putative age of democracy, dictatorship and ideology, but we are reminded here how influential these old elites remained. In fact, it was these aristocratic figures who could fully realize transnationalism, with their multi-national families and land holdings, as polyglots and with their own lingua franca (the U and Non-U in Mitford-speak), and thanks to their (albeit fluctuating) personal fortunes, unusual freedom of movement, and ample free time for politically-motivated sociability. All of this made go-betweens like Carl Eduard Coburg, Furstenberg, and Prince Max Egon zu Holenlohe-Langenburg particularly fearful and hostile to Bolshevism, and, in turn, open to fascism, authoritarianism and Nazism. Aristocrats were attracted to the new regimes in Hungary and Italy because ‘they included the old elite and seemed to give them a new relevance’ (p. 172). Indeed, in identifying these go-betweens and defining their role, we are naturally led to ponder whether reports of the decline and fall of the European aristocracies have been greatly exaggerated.
In this period women were still, of course, excluded from formal diplomatic power. Urbach’s approach is not explicitly about gender nor did she set out to write women back into the story of international relations by probing the underbelly of soft diplomacy. However, by fleshing out the status of, and the methods used by these go-betweens for Hitler, heavily dependent as they were on social and sexual influence and intrigue, the unofficial but no less instrumental power of women is one of the significant revelations here. It is striking that Princess Stephanie Hohenlohe, the arriviste femme fatale and arch manipulator of great and guilty men – Press Baron Lord Rothermere, Hitler’s personal adjutant Fritz Wiedemann and Hitler himself among others – has been effectively erased from the historiography of appeasement until very recently. This is symptomatic of both the gender-blindness of many historians in the field and of a limited scholarly curiosity about figures who kept gossip columnists in business but, seemingly, operated in an exclusive and atrophied milieu of high society. Yet Admiral Horthy complimented the Princess by calling her ‘a great stateswoman’ (p. 229), while Hitler saw her as ‘an excellent saleswoman for the new Germany’ (p. 248). It was she who entertained Konrad Henlein in London in May 1938, generating British sympathy for the Sudeten cause. Her story is by turns stranger than fiction, and it is therefore difficult to fathom how she has remained under the historical radar for so long, especially when so much of the material pertaining to her is open source. Urbach tells her story with entertaining agility, but she also makes it relevant on a much more sophisticated conceptual level as to demonstrate just how unofficial and backdoor diplomacy functioned.
This meticulously researched book begins the complicated but always engrossing task of revealing the complex webs of aristocratic supra-diplomatic relations in a mainly post-monarchical Europe. It lays bare the deep wells of support among the old European elite for Nazism, providing the wider context for understanding the success of appeasement and the appeasers, and the behaviour of the most high-ranking targets of these go-betweens, namely Edward VIII himself. It offers a refreshingly different perspective of the build up to Munich, as ‘what happened during the summer of 1938 was a long theatre performance with an excellent cast of German go-betweens’ (p. 285). This is as full an account as can be offered of aristocratic complicity with the dictators. By giving instances where the trail runs cold, Urbach makes a persuasive case for the opening of archives that have hitherto been closed, such as Lord Rothermere’s papers and, more crucially, the Royal Archives.