NAZI DIPLOMACY. AFTER RIBBENTROP

Evening Post, Volume CXXXVIII, Issue 135, 5 December 1944, Page 4

NAZI DIPLOMACY. AFTER RIBBENTROP

The halcyon days of Nazi diplomacy appear to be long past, but the suggestion that Himmler may replace Ribbentrop with Seyss Inquart as Minister of Foreign Affairs may indicate that the Nazis still hope to gain something from a reshaping, of foreign policy. But "what they can gain is hard to see. Diplomacy in attack and diplomacy in defence differ so greatly that German foreign policy can gain nothing from its successes of 1938-42. Those successes do not point the road to new diplomatic achievements; instead, they bar it, and they load Nazi diplomacy v/ith a scandalous odour that can never be dispersed, however much Ribbentrop himself, with his personal malodorousness, may be replaced by some carefully disinfected successor. The crowning diplomatic feat connected I with the name of Ribbentrop is one \of those 'things that cannot be done twice. Ribbentrop in 1939 carried out the Bismarckian principle of avoiding a war by Germany on two fronts by offering Russia a scrap of paper, which was proved valueless one night in June, 1941; and not all the king's horses and all the king's men could force Moscow, or any other first-class capital, to again accept a Nazi promissory note. No European currency that has been purposely debased by the occupying | Germans is so thoroughly discredited as: is the diplomatic currency of the Nazis. Since June, 1941, Ribbentrop has commanded no diplomatic credit whatever. He side-tracked Russia in 1939 by guile, but he recruited Germany's satellites by force. Not one of these transactions can be repeated.

Perhaps the most remarkable diplomatic performance of Nazi diplomacy under Ribbentrop, following: Hitler's invasion of Russia in 1941, was the continuance—until comparatively recent times—of German diplomatic relations with Turkey.' But this was not a personal triumph for Ribbentrop, though it may have been for the equally unmoral yon Papen. Writing in the New York "Nation" in August, an American commentator on the Near East,- Michael, Carter, states that Turkey's decision to break off diplomatic and economic relations with Germany put an end to "a brilliant psychological war fought by the Nazis inside Turkey's borders. Every German was in it, from yon Papen, the Ambassador, down to the humblest grocery clerk. They were all on the propaganda team; .if-,they, lost, it was not by reason of any amateur performance." Not only was every use made of Turkey's economic dependence on Germany (who at one stage of the war was the sole supplier of certain goods to the Turks) but a-cultural attack on Turkish society by highclass German artists and intellectuals was carefully organised, and the Nazis were liberal spenders in Turkey. Their propaganda expenditure reached six figures annually, much, of it paid in gold. "The professional and upper class society people in Turkey," states the writer quoted, were given "subtle -treatment..: For them, it was German culture: Walter Gieseking was brought all the way out to Istanbul and Ankara to play to packed houses and be paraded through a gala round of receptions. General Rohde, military attache, and Admiral Marvitz, naval attache, were cultured Germans of the old school. They liked nothing better' than-to spend a long social evening with at group of Germantrained Turkish officers who, after all, had, been their comrades-in-arms during the last war. Weekly parties by DNB at the Ankara Palace Hotel, parties at the Embassy—there was not a dull moment for anyone who wanted to. take advantage of Nazi hospitality. The whisky never ran out at the German Embassy, oddly enough; the British Embassy, on the other hand, was constantly threatened with drought, and the American Embassy was bone dry. . . . German propaganda did half the work of keeping Turkey out of the war."

If half the work of keeping Turkey out of the war was done by yon Papen's bribery-flattery team, the other half was done by the German army; and the slipping of German prestige and power in neutral and satellite countries is in line-with the failure and retreat of German arms. Ribbentrop, having lost bargaining power, was unable to hold Finland, Rumania, and Bulgaria. And how can the diplomatic situation be saved by Seyss Inquart, who was \sent by Hitler to manage Austria when the Nazi star was ascending, and who has no magic charm to stay a planetary eclipse? Foreign policy in the Nazi State has shrunk along with the Nazi military pretensions. If .the, German Foreign Office can keep open personal sanctuaries for Nazi leaders in South America or in Japan, that seems to be about the most that can be done. There is still gold in the Nazi coffers that may buy not a new treaty but a castle of refuge in Shangrl La.