Ribbentrop was appointed Ambassador to Britain from 1936 to 1938. He was told by Hitler to seek a German-English entente or alliance. One of his first meetings was in 1936, with the British Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs, Robert Vansittart. In the following year, or 1937, Ribbentrop would subsequently speak with Churchill in private.
Joachim von Ribbentrop, Ambassador
to the Court of St. James's (1936-1938)
Vansittart, Permanent Under-Secretary
for Foreign Affairs, British Foreign Office
The following is from 'The Ribbentrop Memoirs' [1]:
It was unfortunate that I had to do most of the talking; I felt from the start as if I were addressing a wall. Vansittart listened quietly, but was not forthcoming and evaded all my openings for a frank exchange of views. I have spoken to hundreds of Englishmen on this subject, but never was a conversation so barren, never did I find so little response, never did my partner say so little about the points which really mattered. When I asked Sir Robert to express an opinion on certain points and to criticize frankly what I had said, or to explain where exactly we differed in matters of principle or of detail, there was absolutely no reply except generalities. In the following years I often looked back on this conversation.
One thing was clear, an Anglo-German understanding with Vansittart in office was out of the question. Only once again did I have a similar feeling after a conversation. That was in 1937, after a talk with Mr. Churchill, when I was Ambassador in London, except that while Vansittart had expressed no opinion whatever, Mr. Churchill was considerably more frank.
Vansittart, I felt, had completely made up his mind. This Foreign Office man not only advocated the balance of power theory, but was also the incarnation of Sir Eyre Crowe’s principle: 'No pact with Germany come what may.' I gained a firm impression that this man would never even attempt a rapprochement, and any discussion with him would be in vain. The Fuhrer said later that Vansittart must also have been influenced by other reasons, by questions of ideology. I do not know; I do not think so; but this will never be explained. Whatever influences he may have been subjected to, the main thing was his basic attitude: 'Never with Germany.'
Hitler had correctly suspected that Vansittart's misgivings were ideologically rooted [2]:
Vansittart treated the Franco-Soviet alliance as non-negotiable. But he assumed that a settlement would have to provide for German expansion. This he was willing to contemplate. What he rejected was the 'immoral' desire to 'satisfy Hitler's 'land hunger at Russia's expense'. It was because many had equality in Europe already that he wanted Britain to facilitate expansion in Africa.
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[1] Available on The Internet Archive: See this HTML version, for example.
[2] Maurice Cowling, The Impact of Hitler, Cambridge University Press, 1975, p. 157.
