Hitler's Interpreter, The Memoirs of Paul Schmidt by Paul Schmidt

Author:Paul Schmidt
Format: epub
Published: 2016-11-06T04:00:00+00:00

You may rest assured, Monsieur Laval, that the German people have no keener desire than to finally end the strife of centuries with their French neighbour and bury the hatchet. We esteem your fellow countrymen as brave soldiers, we are full of admiration for the achievements of the French spirit. The old apple of discord about Alsace-Lorraine no longer exists. What then is still keeping us from becoming really good neighbours?

These words did not fail in their effect on Laval, who emphasised how strongly he had always advocated a Franco-German rapprochement, and invited me to testify to the efforts he had made in 1931 during the Berlin conversations with Brüning in the cause of Franco-German understanding. I could confirm this with a clear conscience, for I had got the impression both during the Six-Power Conference at Paris and also at Berlin in the autumn of the same year that Laval’s intentions were sincere and that he was striving sincerely for a good-neighbour relationship between the two countries. He did not go into details about the sort of Franco-German settlement he envisaged, although it seemed to me that this was just what was needed. From innumerable discussions in Geneva and Paris I knew how difficult it was to reach results when one really got down to details.

I was also interested to note that Laval, like Eden in Berlin, sought to reassure us about the Soviet intentions. ‘I found nothing in Moscow,’ he said, in language almost identical to that of the Lord Privy Seal, ‘that could suggest that the Soviet Union harbours any warlike intentions against Germany.’ He described Stalin as a man easy to get on with, a man with whom one could talk. Ribbentrop described Stalin to me in similar terms in August 1939 when I accompanied him to Moscow for the conclusion of the sensational German-Soviet pact shortly before the outbreak of war. Roosevelt too, after his first meeting with Stalin at Yalta, expressed a similar opinion to his son and later to some of his colleagues. When I reflect on what I have heard foreigners say after talking to Hitler, I am almost tempted to believe that dictators somehow exercise a special magic on their listeners.

Laval also represented the signing of the Franco-Soviet alliance as a necessity imposed by France’s internal politics. ‘Certain events in Germany,’ he said, ‘and much that has been written and said in your country against France – in conjunction with German rearmament – has caused such apprehension amongst my countrymen that anything calculated to mitigate it will contribute indirectly to Franco-German understanding.’ This line of argument was typical of Laval’s method of conducting negotiations. He was always the skilled, polished French lawyer. In Kraków I found my earlier impressions of Laval confirmed. He seemed to me to belong to the category of hommes de bonne volonté who advocated peace out of conviction. At that time I would have put him on a par with Herriot and Briand without question.

The main impression I

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