In April 1938, journeyman diplomat Herbert von Dirksen was appointed [as the Third Reich’s] ambassador to London. A committed [Fascist] and rabid antisemite, he also harboured a particularly visceral loathing of Poles, believing them to be subhuman, eagerly supporting Poland’s total erasure. Despite this, due to his English language fluency and aristocratic manners, he charmed British officials and citizens alike, and was widely perceived locally as [the Third Reich’s] respectable face.
Even more vitally though, Dirksen — in common with many powerful elements of the British establishment — was convinced that not only could war be avoided, but London and Berlin would instead forge a global economic, military, and political alliance. His 18 months in Britain before [September 1939] were spent working tirelessly to achieve these goals, by establishing and maintaining communication lines between officials and decisionmakers in the two countries, while attempting to broker deals.
Dirksen published an official memoir in 1950, detailing his lengthy diplomatic career. However, far more revealing insights into the period immediately preceding World War II, and behind-the-scenes efforts to achieve enduring detente between Britain and [the Third Reich], are contained in the virtually unknown Dirksen Papers, a two-volume record released by the Soviet Union’s Foreign Languages Publishing House without his consent. They contain private communications sent to and from Dirksen, diary entries, and memos he wrote for himself, never intended for public consumption.
The contents were sourced from a vast trove of documents found by the Red Army after it seized Gröditzberg, a castle owned by Dirksen where he spent most of World War II. Mainstream historians have markedly made no use of the Dirksen Papers. Whether this is due to their bombshell disclosures posing a variety of dire threats to established Western narratives of World War II, and revealing much the British government wishes to remain forever secret, is a matter of speculation.
Immediately after World War II began, Dirksen “keenly” felt an “obligation” to author a detailed post-mortem on the failure of Britain’s peace overtures to [the Third Reich], and his own. He was particularly compelled to write it as “all important documents” in Berlin’s London embassy had been burned following Britain’s formal declaration of war on September 3rd 1939. Reflecting on his experiences, Dirksen spoke of “the tragic and paramount thing about the rise of the new Anglo-German war”:
“Germany demanded an equal place with Britain as a world power…Britain was in principle prepared to concede. But, whereas Germany demanded immediate, complete and unequivocal satisfaction of her demands, Britain - although she was ready to renounce her Eastern commitments, and […] allow Germany a predominant position in East and Southeast Europe, and to discuss genuine world political partnership with Germany - wanted this to be done only by way of negotiation and a gradual revision of British policy.”
‘German Reply’
From London’s perspective, Dirksen lamented, this radical change in the global order “could be effected in a period of months, but not of days or weeks.” Another stumbling block was the British and French making a “guarantee” to defend Poland in the event she was attacked by [the Third Reich], in March 1939. This bellicose stance — along with belligerent speeches from Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain — was at total odds with simultaneous conciliatory approaches such as Düsseldorf, and the private stances and utterances of British officials to their [Reich] counterparts.
In any event, it appears London instantly regretted its pledge to defend Poland. Dirksen records in his post-mortem how subsequently, senior British officials told him they sought “an Anglo-German entente” that would “render Britain’s guarantee policy nugatory” and “enable Britain to extricate her from her predicament in regard to Poland,” so Warsaw would “be left to face Germany alone”.
(Emphasis original.)
While the British upper classes were probably disinterested in starting another war, much of that disinterest arose merely from wanting to strike a kind of bargain with the Third Reich that they would never dare enter into with the Soviets. Quoting Geoffrey Barraclough’s The Origins of Modern Germany, page 453:
[The Fascists’] successes in foreign policy were due less to German rearmament, the deficiencies and limitations of which were known in competent military circles, than to the tacit alliance of powerful reactionary elements in England and France which, although loathe to see a reassertion of German equality, were still more unwilling to check it by military alliance with Soviet Russia or to run the risk of social revolution [in the Reich] as a result of [Fascism’s] fall.
It is probable that the Third Reich never sincerely wanted conflict with the British Empire at all, and duelled mostly because of the conflicting imperialist interests, more or less similarly to the conflict between the Third Reich and Austria.
Per Gerhard Weinberg’s The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany Diplomatic Revolution in Europe 1933–36, pages 342–346, British membership was part of Ribbentrop’s original designs for the Anti‐Comintern Pact in October 1935, and when Ribbentrop became ambassador to the United Kingdom in 1936, the Chancellor made clear to him that it was his greatest wish to welcome Britain into the Anti‐Comintern Pact. While Ribbentrop acted sceptical of this ambition, he placed some hope in King Edward VIII, whom Ribbentrop considered friendly to the German Reich. See Zara Steiner’s The Triumph of the Dark: European International History 1933–1939, pages 262–263.
The Chancellor himself was an Anglomaniac who greatly admired the British Empire, and wanted an official alliance or at least a neutrality with it; only when the British state repeatedly rejected his offer did his opinion on the British sour.
Even when warfare broke out between these two anticommunist states though, Berlin still wanted an Anglo‐German alliance, and despite bombing London the Chancellery nevertheless commanded its armoured units not to advance into the undefended city of Dunkirk, allegedly to ‘spare’ the British forces. This was probably more of a tactical decision than a kind gesture, as they were overextended and at risk of being of cut off, but it suggests that they wanted diplomacy regardless.
And this only the tip of the iceberg. Between the British Empire’s important influence on the Third Reich, its sale of raw materials to the Third Reich, its extension of credits thereto, its eugenic influence thereon, its internment of Jewish refugees, and the plans for Operation Unthinkable, it should be easy for all lower-class people to hate the British ruling class (even more).