A SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK
IWAS reading during last week-end the recollections of Baron von Weiszacker, which have just been published in Germany, and was deep in them when (turning from book to newspaper for a moment) I found the news that von Weiszacker has just been released from the imprisonment to which, with very doubtful justice, he was sentenced as a war- criminal by an American military court in 1949. Von Weiszacker was State-Secretary (corresponding to our Permanent Under-Secretary) at the German Foreign Office from 1938 to 1943, and might therefore be considered to have been implicaled in all the things which led to the tragedy of 1939. His bbok shows him playing a precisely opposite part, working ceaselessly, and at considerable personal risk, for peace when his 'chief, von Ribbentrop, was as diligently insti- gating Hitler to war. That, someone. may comment, is naturally the picture a man in von Weiszacker's position would paint of himself in the changed circumstances of today. It may be ; but it does not follow that it is a false picture: Having known von Weiszacker in the pre-war days, I believe him to be perfectly sincere. Temperamentally he was fundamentally anti-Nazi. Offered the post of State-Secretary in 1938, he asked himself whether he could attempt more for peace in the Foreign Office or out of it. Rightly or wrongly (probably rightly, in my judgement) he thought inside ; so he accepted. Unknown, of course, to his chief he sent secret warnings to London about the developments of the Czech crisis in 1938 and, much more important, about the negotia- tions for the Russo-German Pact in 1939. * * * .*
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