Robert Vansittart, 1st Baron Vansittart

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Robert Vansittart 1929

Robert Gilbert Vansittart, 1st Baron Vansittart , GCB , GCMG , (born June 25, 1881 in Farnham , Surrey , † February 14, 1957 in Denham , Buckinghamshire ) was a British diplomat .

Life

Robert Vansittart, a second cousin of Thomas Edward Lawrence ( Lawrence of Arabia ), attended Eton College and then worked as a diplomat in Paris (Peace Conference 1919–1920), Tehran and Cairo . He was then private secretary of Lord Curzons , the chief of the America department in the State Department, later private secretary of the Prime Ministers Stanley Baldwin and Ramsay MacDonald . In 1929 he became Permanent Under Secretary in the State Department.

Until 1937 he was the chief official in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. As an opponent of the appeasement policy , he later came into conflict with Prime Minister Arthur Neville Chamberlain and was deported to the insignificant post of advisor. He contacted Carl Friedrich Goerdeler through Arthur Primrose Young (he thought he recognized him as a “ traitor ”) and brought his assessments of Hitler into the political debate.

In late autumn 1940, he published seven-part BBC - radio broadcasts , read by himself, and January to March 1941 in booklet form with a circulation of over 1 million units for the British under the title Black Record anti-German 70-page pamphlets that one in the days of Tacitus starting history German aggression in Europe told and the opinion of the later Chancellor Willy Brandt of Hitler's racial theories closely related goods and the concept of Vansittartism justified. After that, as Brandt put the simplistic war propaganda of “vulgar Vansittarism” in a nutshell, “the Germans were always cruel. They are inherently bad. ”This generalization ignored and hindered the other Germany as a political force.

On July 3, 1941, as Baron Vansittart , of Denham in the County of Buckingham , he was raised to the hereditary nobility and thus automatically a member of the British House of Lords . He was one of the few foreign observers who had known about the genocide of European Jews since 1942 .

Collective guilt :

  • “The German ... was always the barbarian, the admirer of war, the enemy - secretly or openly - of philanthropy, liberalism and Christian civilization; and the Hitler regime is not a coincidental phenomenon, but the logical consequence of German history, of German in excelsis. "
  • “England no longer needs a Secret Service in Germany; the Germans themselves come to us in droves and tell us everything, ” Vansittart stated cynically in 1939.

criticism

A well-known English critic of Vansittart was the British socialist Victor Gollancz . Robert Neumann wrote a parody entitled The Protocols of the Wise Men of Bonn in which he had Vansittart report on the “very top secret plan of world slavery”: “It went back to the year 2413 BC. Since then, 859 times in total, he has repeatedly plunged humanity into ruin. "

Vansittart was a friend of Alexander Kordas , to whose film The Thief of Baghdad he contributed lyrics.

His title of nobility expired with his death as he had no male descendants.

memoirs

  • Lessons of My Life (1945)
  • The Mist Procession (1958)

literature

  • The agitator. Lord Vansittart and the British war propaganda against Germany 1939–1945. A documentation . Translated from English with a biographical note, an introduction and notes by Olaf Rose. Druffel and Vowinckel, Stegen am Ammersee 2004, ISBN 3-8061-1159-6 .
  • Jörg Später: The Critique of the »Other Germany« . In: “Jour fixe” initiative Berlin (ed.): Fluchtlinien des Exile . Unrast, Münster 2004. ISBN 3-89771-431-0 .
  • Jörg later: Vansittart. British debates on Nazis and Germans 1902-1945 (= modern times. New research on the social and cultural history of the 19th and 20th centuries , vol. 4). Wallstein, Göttingen 2003, ISBN 3-89244-692-X .
  • Matthias Wolbold: Talking about Germany. The radio speeches of Thomas Mann , Paul Tillich and Sir Robert Vansittart from the Second World War . Lit, Münster 2005, ISBN 3-8258-9024-4 .
  • Lord Robert Gilbert Vansittart , in: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 18/1957 of April 22, 1957, in the Munzinger Archive ( beginning of article freely available)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Norbert F. Pötzl: Absolutes Schweigen , Spiegel special 2/2005
  2. ↑ Jörg Später: Vansittart. British Debates on Germans and Nazis 1902–1945. Wallstein, Göttingen 2003, p. 9
  3. ^ Anja Worm and Jan Gerber in Hymns of Hate in Jungle World in February 2010
  4. ↑ Willy Brandt : Criminals and other Germans . Dietz, Bonn 2007, p. 45 ff . (Norwegian: Forbrytere og andre tyskere . 1946.).
  5. ^ The London Gazette : No. 35217, p. 3991, July 11, 1941.
  6. ↑ From the blurb of the English edition.
  7. ^ Margret Boveri : The betrayal in the 20th century . Vol. 2: For and against the nation. The invisible happening . Rowohlt, Hamburg 1956, p. 98.
  8. ↑ Robert Neumann: With strange feathers. The second volume parodies . Verlag Desch, Munich 1955, pp. 156-158.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Vansittart, Robert, 1st Baron Vansittart
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Vansittart, Robert Gilbert, 1st Baron Vansittart
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British diplomat
DATE OF BIRTH June 25, 1881
PLACE OF BIRTH Farnham , Surrey
DATE OF DEATH February 14, 1957
Place of death Denham , Buckinghamshire