negotiations with Hitler are widely regarded as one of the great follies of the Second World War. Chamberlain fell under Hitler’s spell. He was outmaneuvered at the bargaining table. He misread Hitler’s intentions, and failed to warn Hitler that if he reneged on his promises there would be serious consequences. History has not been kind to Neville Chamberlain.
But underneath those criticisms is a puzzle. Chamberlain flew back to Germany two more times. He sat with Hitler for hours. The two men talked, argued, ate together, walked around together. Chamberlain was the only Allied leader of that period to spend any significant time with Hitler. He made careful note of the man’s behavior. “Hitler’s appearance and manner when I saw him appeared to show that the storm signals were up,” Chamberlain told his sister Hilda after another of his visits to Germany. But then “he gave me the double handshake that he reserves for specially friendly demonstrations.” Back in London, he told his cabinet that he had seen in the Führer “no signs of insanity but many of excitement.” Hitler wasn’t crazy. He was rational, determined: “He had thought out what he wanted and he meant to get it and he would not brook opposition beyond a certain point.”
Chamberlain was acting on the same assumption that we all follow in our efforts to make sense of strangers. We believe that the information gathered from a personal interaction is uniquely valuable. You would never hire a babysitter for your children without meeting that person first. Companies don’t hire employees blind. They call them in and interview them closely, sometimes for hours at a stretch, on more than one occasion. They do what Chamberlain did: they look people in the eye, observe their demeanor and behavior, and draw conclusions. He gave me the double handshake. Yet all that extra information Chamberlain gathered from his personal interactions with Hitler didn’t help him see Hitler more clearly. It did the opposite.
Is this because Chamberlain was naive? Perhaps. His experience in foreign affairs was minimal. One of his critics would later compare him to a priest entering a pub for the first time, blind to the difference “between a social gathering and a rough house.”
But this pattern isn’t confined to Chamberlain. It also afflicted Lord Halifax, who would go on to become Chamberlain’s foreign secretary. Halifax was an aristocrat, a superb student at Eton and Oxford. He served as Viceroy of India between the wars, where he negotiated brilliantly with Mahatma Gandhi. He was everything Chamberlain was not: worldly, seasoned, deeply charming, an intellectual—a man of such resolute religiosity that Churchill dubbed him the “Holy Fox.”
Halifax went to Berlin in the fall of 1937 and met with the German leader at Berchtesgaden: he was the only other member of England’s ruling circle to have spent time with the Führer. Their meeting wasn’t some meaningless diplomatic reception. It began with Halifax mistaking Hitler for a footman and almost handing him his coat. And then Hitler was Hitler for five hours: sulking, shouting, digressing, denouncing. He talked about how much he hated the press. He talked about the evils of communism. Halifax listened to the performance with what another British diplomat at the time called a “mixture of astonishment, repugnance, and compassion.”
Halifax spent five days in Germany. He met with two of Hitler’s top ministers—Hermann Göring and Joseph Goebbels. He attended a dinner at the British Embassy, where he met a host of senior German politicians and businessmen. When he returned home, Halifax said that it was “all to the good making contact” with the German leadership, which is hard to dispute. That’s what a diplomat is supposed to do. He had gained valuable insights from their face-to-face encounter about Hitler’s bullying and volatility. But what was Halifax’s ultimate conclusion? That Hitler didn’t want to go to war, and was open to negotiating a peace. No one ever thought Halifax was naive, yet he was as deluded after meeting with Hitler as Chamberlain was.
The British diplomat who spent the most time with Hitler was the ambassador to Germany, Nevile Henderson. He met Hitler repeatedly, went to his rallies. Hitler even had a nickname for Henderson, “The man with the carnation,” because of the flower the dapper Henderson always wore in his lapel. After attending the infamous Nuremberg Rally in early September 1938, Henderson wrote in his dispatch to London that Hitler seemed so abnormal that “he may have crossed the borderline into insanity.” Henderson wasn’t in Hitler’s thrall.