Best-selling Blue Book

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLVIII, Issue 21558, 22 January 1940, Page 6

Best-selling Blue Book

A BRITISH Official Wireless message at the end t*- of last week reported that the British Government’s Blue Book containing all the documents relating to German-Polish relations had now become a best seller, a total of 565,000 copies having been distributed to the public. The book, which was issued in England at the price of one shilling, gives the reader inside knowledge of the exhausting negotiations which took place between the British Ambassador in Berlin, Sir Nevile Henderson, and the Nazi leaders, Hitler, von Ribbentrop and Goering before the invasion of Poland began. Its fascination lies in the fact that the reader is made privy to what would ordinarily be regarded as State secrets. Dispatches the Ambassador sent to the Foreign Secretary and what Lord Halifax wrote back is all recorded between the covers of this modest volume. Full accounts of Sir Nevile Henderson’s interviews with Hitler are recorded there just as they are in the archives of the Foreign Office. Naturally it is gloomy reading, but amazing insights are given into the way in which the minds of Hitler and his closest associates worked. The last thing to be expected in such a publication is a touch of fun, but even this peeps shyly through in the report of a meeting between the Ambassador and Goering.

It had not been a pleasant interview and Goering asserted that the history of Germany was one of ups and downs, but this was one of her “up” periods. “As I got up to go the conversation then took a more amicable turn,” says Sir Nevile. “Though I was in a hurry, he insisted on showing me with much pride the great structural alterations which he is making in his house at Karinhall and which include a new dining-room to hold an incredible number of guests and to be all of marble and hung with tapestries. He also produced with pride the drawings of the tapestries, mostly representing naked ladies labelled with the names of various virtues, such as Goodness, Mercy, Purity, &c. I told him that they at least looked pacific, but that I failed to see Patience among them.” Perhaps there is humour, too, in Hitler’s description of himself as “by nature an artist, not a politician.”