Talk:Nevile Henderson
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[edit] Assessment
The post of ambassador to Berlin during and after Munich was never going to be an easy one. No ambassador, whatever his private views, can afford to take a different public position from the Prime Minister or the government of the day and expect to remain in place. Henderson has thus been targeted as a leading appeaser, sometimes in quite distasteful terms, though he was never more than a scapegoat for policy failings elsewhere. Lewis Namier, called him an 'ill-starred man', and in The Appeasers Martin Gilbert and Richard Gott even refer to him as "our Nazi Ambassador in Berlin." So, what's the evidence? Does he deserve such opprobrium. No, quite frankly, he does not.
During his career Henderson made steady progress in the Diplomatic Service, and was particularly successful in Belgrade, where he enjoyed a good relationship with King Alexander. It was because of this that he was given the important Berlin posting in 1937. But from the outset there was a problem: he loathed Ribbentrop, and Ribbentrop loathed him, conveying his feelings to Hitler. He did, however, enjoy good realtions with Hermann Göring, whom he considered to be a 'moderate', who might exercise a restraining influence on Hitler. As far as Hitler himself was concerned Henderson believed him to be so abnormal that he might, as he put it, "have crossed the borderline into outright insanity."
Henderson's chief weakness was a failure to recognise the insanity of the whole Nazi system. He continued to believe that he could operate within the reasonable parameters of classic diplomacy. In this he was no different from many others, including Josef Stalin, who right up to the German invasion of Russia in 1941 believed that Hitler was moved by the same pragmatic considerations as he was himself. For Henderson, Hitler was simply an 'aggrieved nationalist', who could be expected to move down reasonable paths with proper encouragement, and the right kind of concessions. The story of his mission in Berlin is the story of increasingly desperate attempts to save the peace. Yes, he supported Munich, not just because of sympathy for the 'grievances' of the Germans, but because he was aware of Britain's military weakness at that time. If a war was to be fought it had to be winnable; and Henderson's appeasement went hand-in-hand with support for rearmament.
Like Chamberlain himself, Henderson recognised that the German occupation of the purely Czech lands of Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939 marked a new point of departure in international relations, and he warned both Ribbentrop and Hitler of the consequences of further aggression. He was fully behind the British guarantee to Poland. During a face-to-face interview with Hitler on 29 August 1939, he even had the courage to yell "I and his Majesty's Government did not give a row of pins whether Germans were slaughtered or not." And this to Hitler! All of this is detailed in Failure of a Mission, the memoir Henderson published in 1940.
In the end, no matter how vigorous a voice, Henderson was merely a messenger. And, as such, he has been unfairly shot, both then and since. Clio the Muse 01:03, 22 July 2007 (UTC)
