Berlin 1937–1939
Ogilvie-Forbes was appointed Counsellor to the Embassy in Berlin in early April 1937. Sir Nevile Henderson, the new ambassador, arrived shortly afterwards. It was unusual to replace an ambassador and his second-in-command at the same time especially in an embassy of such significance. Ogilvie-Forbes and Henderson had differing attitudes towards Hitler and the Nazi regime, and their personal relationship was strained from the start. Ogilvie-Forbes wrote that Henderson was "rude and domineering". In the various degrees of approach to Appeasement, Henderson certainly shared the views of Neville Chamberlain, and as far as possible he dealt with Chamberlain directly, regularly bypassing the Foreign Office. Henderson was appointed in the hope that he might befriend Hitler and thus help to moderate the latter's behaviour towards Britain. As late as February 1939 Henderson wrote "If we handle him (Hitler) right, my belief is that he will become gradually more pacific. But if we treat him as a pariah or mad dog we shall turn him irrevocably into one". From August 1937 onward, in the power struggle that developed between Henderson and Vansittart, Ogilvie-Forbes tended to back the latter, which made relations with the former very difficult. On 14 September 1938, Ogilvie-Forbes warned Ernst von Weizsäcker, the State Secretary of the Auswärtiges Amt, that the proposal of Neville Chamberlain to allow the Sudetenland to be incorporated into the Reich showed how far Britain was willing to go to save the peace, but if Germany kept up its current negative attitude, then the result would be war. In speaking to Weizsäcker, Ogilvie-Forbes was saying essentially the same thing as Henderson, but in far stronger and blunter language.
In October 1938, Ogilive-Forbes wrote to Sir Oliver Harvey, the Principal Private Secretary to the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax: "In the major political business of this Embassy I have always been ignored. My views or participation are neither asked for nor wanted nor do I see the papers (and by no means all of them) until long after action. It is also very difficult to work for one who is so often excited, rude and domineering over trivial and [sensitive? (text unclear)] matters and all the more discouraging because I have been constantly loyal to both his personality and his policy, as is my duty."
By mid 1938 it was clear that Henderson was a very sick man, and in October he had to return to London and take five months leave for treatment for the cancer from which he died in 1942. During this time Ogilvie-Forbes was in charge of the Embassy. He had a much more pessimistic view of Hitler than Henderson and this was reflected in his dispatches back to the Foreign Office. Ogilvie-Forbes shared the widespread feeling in Britain that the Treaty of Versailles had been too harsh on Germany and he had supported the Munich Agreement on the grounds that the Sudetenland should never have been included in Czechoslovakia in the first place. However, unlike Henderson, Ogilvie-Forbes believed that the Nazi regime had foreign policy goals that went well beyond revising the Treaty of Versailles and were aimed at winning Germany the "world power status" that she had sought in the First World War.
In the work involving the implementation of the Munich Agreement as a joint Anglo-German-Franco-Italo commission had the task of deciding what districts of the Sudetenland were to join Germany, Ogilvie-Forbes became increasingly tired "of the Germans' arrogant and dictatorial actions, and their blatant disregard for the letter and spirit of Munich." On 11 October 1938, in one of his last instructions before he left Berlin, Henderson ordered Ogilvie-Forbes to accept the German definition of where the new German-Czechoslovak frontier should be, adding in that he hoped "that the Slovaks [would] stick it to the Czechs". Ogilvie-Forbes by contrast tried as much as possible to include majority Czech districts within Czecho-Slovakia as Czechoslovakia was renamed. By 26 October 1938, Ogilvie-Forbes had counted over 300 violations of the Munich Agreement as the Germans sought to claim districts of the Sudetenland that were, in fact, majority Czech with the aim of making Czecho-Slovakia economically nonviable. He complained that the frontier claimed by the Germans was "cunningly" drawn to cause economic chaos as "almost all of the main arteries of Bohemia and Moravia must now traverse territory occupied by the Germans". As the Sudetenland was turned over in stages to Germany in October–November 1938, Ogilvie-Forbes complained that the German authorities were expelling Jews from the Sudetenland in violation of the Munich Agreement, which stated all of the people living in the Sudetenland had the right to stay. On 17 November 1938, Weizsäcker presented Ogilvie-Forbes with a quasi-ultimatum claiming a district of Czecho-Slovakia which as the latter noted as "populated by about 6,000 Germans and 50,000 Czechs". Ogilvie-Forbes wrote that to agree to this "would appear to be truckling to an unreasonable demand and out of accord with the terms and the spirit of the Munich agreement" while also writing "to refuse would be regarded by the Germans as contrary to His Majesty's Government's policy of Anglo-German rapprochement as recorded at Munich". The Foreign Secretary, Halifax, ordered Ogilvie-Forbes to accept the German demand despite the way it clearly violated the Munich agreement, which stated that only districts of the Sudetenland that were 50% ethnically German or more based on the outdated Austrian census of 1910 (rather than the more recent Czechoslovak census of 1930) were to go to Germany.
In the months that followed, his appraisal of the situation was bleak, emphasising that Hitler could not be trusted and "had unlimited aims of world domination and an 'insensate' hatred of Britain... that appeasement could never succeed... that the German economy was solely directed towards military ends... and Hitler could only be removed after a military defeat, Britain would have to choose between war and surrender." He could see no possibility at all of Göring (whom he knew personally) leading a movement against the Führer, and dismissed the idea of an internal German revolt to overthrow the Nazis. On 21 October 1938, Ogilvie-Forbes attended a speech by the Propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels in Hamburg, which he summarised as: "filled with a glorification of force and of its successful employment by the Nationalist-Socialist leadership."
It has been argued by the Canadian historian Bruce Strang, that during the time of Henderson's absence, Ogilvie-Forbes, was able to have a significant effect on British Foreign policy, as he wrote: "It was not a coincidence that the decisive turn in the Cabinet's perception of Hitler occurred while Sir George Ogilvie-Forbes temporarily headed the Berlin Embassy, as he helped to undermine Chamberlain's often inaccurate views, and to create the climate of moral revulsion and the heightened sense of danger in which the Cabinet operated."
This "moral revulsion" was perhaps most keenly conveyed by the barrage of strongly worded reports concerning the plight of the Jews in Germany sent by Ogilvie-Forbes. In a letter to Halifax after Kristallnacht (10 November 1938), Ogilvie-Forbes described how he and members of his staff witnessed the looting and destruction of Jewish property. The attacks, he wrote, started at a given hour, targeted with uncanny precision Jewish shops and buildings and ended on the word of Goebbels who condoned what had been done. Towards the end of his letter Ogilvie-Forbes wrote "I think the murder of Herr vom Rath by a German born Polish Jew has only accelerated the elimination of the Jews which has for long been planned... It has let loose the forces of mediaeval barbarism... I can find no words strong enough in condemnation of the disgusting treatment of innocent people and the civilized world is faced with the appalling sight of 500,000 people about to rot away in starvation." He pointed out that this is not just a national problem but also a world problem. On 13 November 1938, Ogilvie-Forbes reported after Kristallnacht many German Jews "are wandering about in the streets and parks afraid to return to their homes". Ogilvie-Forbes also reported with disgust that none of the perpetrators of the Kristallnacht were going to be punished and that the Reich government had imposed a 1 billion Reichsmark fine on the entire Jewish community in Germany to punish the Jews for the violence inflicted on them. Since most of the Jewish homes and businesses had been destroyed in the Kristallnacht, Ogilvie-Forbes predicted the 1 billion Reichsmark fine was going to drive the German Jewish community into utter destitution.
Ogilvie-Forbes was in contact with members of the German opposition, who provided intelligence such as a copy of Hitler's secret speech to a group of 200 German journalists on 10 November 1938 saying he wanted more bellicose media coverage to prepare Germany for war. Ogilvie-Forbes also noted that in the secret speech Hitler called for Britain to be presented as "public enemy number one" and he kept hearing rumours that Hitler was planning to renounce the Anglo-German Naval Agreement. In this regard, Ogilvie-Forbes noted the German media was entirely Anglophobic with France being spared any abuse, which led him to the conclusion that Hitler was trying to sever France from Britain, so it could take on the latter alone without confronting the former. When Hitler gave the departing French ambassador André François-Poncet a medal at their last meeting in October 1938 for his work in improving Franco-German relations, Ogilvie-Forbes saw sinister implications in this. Amongst Ogilvie-Forbes's sources were Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, Ewald von Kleist-Schmenzin, Fabian von Schlabrendorff, and the mysterious man with the surname Ritter whom Ogilive-Forbes called K (as in knight, the equivalent English word for Ritter). Just whom K. was remains a mystery as the files from the British Embassy state his surname was Ritter (a common surname in Germany) and nothing else. K. reported that he had seen a plan to have the Luftwaffe prepare a bombing campaign to set London ablaze. At the same time, Ogilive-Forbes noted the increasing anti-British tone of the German media, evidence that Hitler had given orders to increase the size of the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine (which suggested German foreign policy was indeed turning anti-British), and information that Germany was moving over to a "total war" economy. Ogilivie-Forbes portrayed Hitler as a leader who was barely sane, if at all, and suggested he was eminently capable of a "mad dog act", a sudden, reckless act of aggression that would plunge the world into a world war. Halifax was known as the "Holy Fox" due to his cunning and his devotion to the Church of England, and Ogilvie-Forbes's picture of a brutal Nazi regime running roughshod over innocent German Jews disturbed Halifax's Anglican conscience.
At a meeting of the Foreign Policy Committee on 14 November 1938, Halifax cited Ogilvie-Forbes's dispatches as a reason for a tougher line with Germany. At a meeting of the cabinet, only the War Secretary Leslie Hore-Belisha supported Halifax's proposals for an "economic offensive" to keep the Balkans out of the German economic sphere of influence with Chamberlain; the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir John Simon; and the President of the Board of Trade, Sir Oliver Stanley, all condemning Halifax's plans as "economically unsound". The information from K. about the purported plan to raze London had more impact on British policy with Sir Alexander Cadogan writing in his diary about Chamberlain's reaction: "Glad he takes it seriously." At a meeting of the Committee of Imperial Defence called to discuss the information from K., Halifax's proposed staff talks with the French and propaganda around the world to counter the anti-British propaganda campaign coming from Germany as Goebbels was attacking Britain not just in Germany, but all around the world. Though Chamberlain dismissed the possibility of a surprise German bombing attack on London as unlikely, the Home Secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, generally regarded as an ally of Chamberlain, came out in support of Halifax. Whilst Halifax did not prevail in this debate, the fact that he won over several cabinet ministers to his side suggests the direction the cabinet was moving in.
In a dispatch to London on 6 December 1938, Ogilvie-Forbes quoted from Mein Kampf to argue that for Hitler Germany could not obtain "world power status" without first winning Lebensraum ("living space") in Russia. Ogilvie-Forbes argued that with the Reich rearmed and in possession of Austria and the Sudetenland, what he was hearing from sources in Berlin was "that Herr Hitler is about to embark on the third stage of his programme, namely expansion beyond the boundaries of the territories inhabited by Germans. How exactly this is be achieved is the object of much speculation. One thing is certain: Nazi aims are on a grandiose scale, and there is no limit to their ultimate ambitions". Some sources were telling Ogilvie-Forbes that Hitler was planning to attack the Soviet Union in 1939 to establish "an independent Russian Ukraine under German tutelage", and afterwards Germany would expand into the Balkans and seek an "outlet on the Mediterranean via Italy". Other sources were telling Ogilvie-Forbes that Hitler was thinking about turning west in 1939 to "liquidate" France and Britain before Germany fell behind in the arms race. Ogilvie-Forbes quoted one German official as saying to him that Hitler was still undecided whether to turn west or east in 1939, but "it is the profound conviction of almost every thinking German that the tiger [Hitler] will jump soon".
Ogilvie-Forbes further reported that Hitler regarded the Munich Agreement as a diplomatic defeat as what he wanted was a war to "smash" Czechoslovakia, not an agreement to hand over the Sudetenland. He wrote that his sources were telling him that Hitler had wished he had taken a "stronger line" at the Munich conference, was now "abusing his moderate counselors for their pusillanimity" and had "dubbed all his generals cowards" for advising him not to attack Czechoslovakia in September 1938. Sir William Strang of the Foreign Office's Central Department wrote after reading the dispatch of 6 December: "This dispatch is a plain warning which ought not to be ignored. Unless we can rapidly and effectively increase our immediate powers of resistance, the expectation of the life of the British Empire may be shorter than we are perhaps ready to suppose". In another dispatch, Ogilvie-Forbes reported that the Nazi regime was upset that British spending on defence had not decreased after the Munich Agreement as expected, and that Hitler was planning to increase his defence spending in order to win the arms race and allow Germany to dominate Europe. On 2 January 1939, Ogilvie-Forbes endorsed a report from the military attache Colonel Noel Mason-MacFarlane. He supported Mason-MacFarlane's conclusion that another war was imminent even if he could not predict for certain what Hitler would do in 1939: "What is certain is that the military and civilian resources of the country are prepared for an emergency." Mason-MacFarlane wrote he believed that given the current political and economic problems faced by the Reich, Hitler would almost certainly resort to "some foreign excursion" as the way out and that the German economy and military were on "full throttle" for war. Ogilvie-Forbes also endorsed Mason-MacFarlane's conclusion that Halifax should work to strengthen Anglo-French ties and to encourage the French to improve their ties with their allies in Eastern Europe, saying that a combination of Britain and France was the only thing that could deter Hitler from choosing war. Finally, Ogilvie-Forbes approved of Mason-MacFarlane's warning that Hitler would probably strike one of the states of Eastern Europe, such as Czecho-Slovakia, Poland or the Soviet Union in order to exploit their natural resources and people before turning west to strike at France and Great Britain.
On 3 January 1939, Ogilvie-Forbes engaged in what Ascher called an act of personal appeasement towards Henderson, when he wrote in a dispatch that the Wehrmacht was so overwhelmingly powerful that there was now nothing Britain could do to stop Germany from dominating Eastern Europe, and that British diplomats should make more efforts "to cultivate Field Marshal Göring and the moderate Nazis with a view to their exercising a restraining influence on the extremists such as Ribbentrop, Goebbels, and Himmler who at present have the ear of Hitler". In the same dispatch, he wrote that Göring "is so devotedly loyal to his chief that I see no indication whatever of his leading a movement against the Führer". Ascher wrote that this dispatch is so completely at odds with the rest of the dispatches Ogilvie-Forbes sent between October 1938-February 1939 that it is hard to guess what Ogilvie-Forbes was thinking when he wrote it. Ascher argued that the most likely explanation was that the dispatch of 3 January was meant to appease Henderson when he returned to the embassy in Berlin, as Ogilvie-Forbes knew that Henderson would disapprove of what he was writing, as indeed he did.
In a dispatch in January 1939, Ogilvie-Forbes warned that Hitler was planning to turn the Franco-German friendship pact of 6 December 1938 into a non-aggression pact, which would leave Britain alone as the Reich's main enemy in western Europe. Afterwards, he predicted that if what he was hearing about Hitler's plans for expanding Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine was true, that Germany would launch an air-naval offensive against Britain with the Luftwaffe to bomb British cities into the ground while the Kriegsmarine would sink the British Merchant Marine, causing a famine since Britain's population exceeded its agricultural capacity. In this regard, Ogilvie-Forbes stated that he kept hearing rumours that Hitler was planning to seize the Netherlands to provide air bases closer to Britain. Ogilvie-Forbes ended by suggesting there was no resistance movement in Germany that was powerful enough to overthrow the Nazi regime, but Hitler could be overthrown externally.
In the Berlin Embassy's annual report for 1938 Ogilvie-Forbes noted that at the beginning of the year it was estimated there were 15,700 prisoners at Dachau of whom over 12,000 were Jews being subjected to harsh treatment. In the concentration camp at Buchenwald there were 30,000 Jews who were in many cases treated with brutality. He warned that unless Hitler was stopped by war, "extermination [of the Jews] in Germany can only be a matter of time." Ogilvie-Forbes argued on several occasions that the British Government might persuade Hitler to use the one billion Reichsmark fine, levied against the entire community of German Jews after Kristallnacht to punish them for having allegedly provoked the pogrom against themselves, to fund Jewish emigration, an action that he believed could really save Jewish lives. The government ignored this suggestion. He was also keen to point out that Nazi anti-Semitism was symptomatic of Hitler's frame of mind; that it was Hitler who was personally conducting the campaign against the Jews. The American historian Abraham Ascher, himself a German Jew who fled the Third Reich, wrote that there was a real sense of personal empathy with the sufferings of German Jews in Ogilvie-Forbes's dispatches that Henderson never displayed. Unlike Henderson, Ogilvie-Forbes attached far greater significance to Nazi antisemitism.
After Hitler gave his "Prophecy Speech" to the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, Ogilvie-Forbes wrote the "extermination" of the Jews in Germany "can only be a matter of time". Ogilvie-Forbes wrote that antisemitism in Germany was "not a national, but a world problem, which if neglected, contains the seeds of a terrible vengeance". As regards helping individual Jews to escape from the Nazis, in his position as a senior diplomat Ogilvie-Forbes could not be seen to be "bending the rules". However, he was able to help an acquaintance, Klaus Neuberg and secure the release of his son and three nephews from Sachsenhausen, and the subsequent move of eight of the family to New Zealand. This was organised through Captain Frank Foley, the passport control officer in the embassy, whom Ogilvie-Forbes supported, unofficially, in his work to enable thousands of Jews to escape. A New Zealand man, John Schellenberg in a letter of 14 March 2004 to the British historian Sir Martin Gilbert stated that Ogilive-Forbes assisted the efforts of his parents to leave Germany. Schellenberg's father, Rudolf Schellenberg, was the Jewish service manager of a local Ford dealership in Berlin, and Ogilvie-Forbes was a customer. Schellenberg fils told Gilbert:"One day in 1938, Forbes came to my father and advised him that it would be well to take his family out of Germany as soon as possible. Further, Forbes undertook to provide papers for any country in the British Empire that my parents choose. So it came about that they chose New Zealand, papers were duly provided and the three of us arrived safely in Wellington on 28 March 1939. My father's parents, two of his uncles and an aunt, and their spouses, my mother's widowed mother, and one of her sisters-all were lost. There is no doubt in my mind that Forbes must have arranged the New Zealand documentation through Foley and I have in my possession the original of a letter approving our entry into this country, written by the responsible Government authority. It is addressed to the Passport Control Officer, British Embassy, Berlin."
Ogilvie-Forbes's dispatches had an impact on British foreign policy decision-making in the winter of 1938–39 as Halifax who during this period was consistently the member of the Chamberlain cabinet toughest on Germany, used the dispatches from Berlin to argue in cabinet that Britain needed a harder line with the Reich. In part because of the dispatches written by Ogilvie-Forbes, Britain announced a "guarantee" of France, the Low Countries and Switzerland in February 1939, warning that any German aggression against those states would automatically lead to war with the United Kingdom.
When Henderson returned to Berlin on 13 February 1939, his first act was to assemble the senior embassy staff to castigate Ogilvie-Forbes for what he had written in his dispatches during his absence. Henderson announced that henceforward all dispatches from the embassy in Berlin would have to conform to his views and that any diplomat who disobeyed this directive would be fired from the Foreign Office. In a lengthy dispatch Henderson sent on 6 March 1939, he denounced almost everything that Ogilvie-Forbes had written during his absence. From that time until August, Ogilvie-Forbes was largely excluded from the decision-making process. In August 1939, American journalist Louis P. Lochner showed the American diplomat Alexander Comstock Kirk the text of the Obersalzberg speech, calling for the coming war in Poland to be conducted in the most inhumane way possible and he gave Genghis Khan as a role model, asking him to transmit back to Washington, but Kirk was not interested. On 22 August 1939, Lochner contacted Ogilvie-Forbes and gave him the text of the Obersalzberg speech, which he reported back to London the same day.
Margaret Reid, who worked in the passport control office of the Berlin Embassy, issued visas that allowed thousands of Jews to emigrate. She often bent the rules for issuing visas, a practice that was deliberately overlooked by Ogilvie-Forbes. Both Reid and Ogilvie-Forbes were recipients of the British Hero of the Holocaust award in January 2018 for saving Jewish lives. Frank Foley was one of the first recipients in 2010.
