Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

Very soon I moved to Canada, private misgivings subsumed by new duties, faces, landscapes. The country sheltered considerable Estonian communities, where my pamphlets were known, my reception was friendly, though later fluctuating. In Quebec, a French-Canadian historian, whose salary was afterwards shown to be supplemented by Taiwan, Saudi Arabia and his Californian neo-Nazi publisher, assured me that the Katyn murders had been a hoax, pre-war Estonia a Red hotbed, the Holocaust a Jewish propagandist distortion of regrettable deaths from typhus and Churchill-induced food shortages. Students heard in puzzling silence his insistence that Auschwitz casualties were because of faulty application of a gas disinfectant prescribed by League of Nations health regulations, my own pamphlet a disgrace of truth. No one objected, though eyes turned on me in reproach or accusation. Anne Frank’s diary was, he continued, a recognized forgery, his own book, Unimpeachable Witness, was being filmed in East Germany.

Restoring my morale, UNESCO commissioned a book, Secret Protocol , based on my pamphlets and broadcasts, centred on the origins of the Nazi–Soviet Pact and its aftermath. This gave me purpose, sometimes excitement and anger, unworthy of an objective historian, though lack of such feelings would make a curious human being. I could still be astonished by suave, blackmailing diplomacy, the push from the balcony or faked suicide, Field-Marshal von Manstein’s refusal to join the July Plot, from inability to believe his troops’ excesses in Russia.

Further attempts to focus the Herr General were unsuccessful, though instances of sardonic comedy were plentiful. A pre-war Baltic minister, accused of assisting Nazis, boasting of being on Beria’s Black List of those sufficiently important to receive immediate execution, was aggrieved when acquitted, his status being too lowly. Thousands of dollars were spent tracking a Soviet formula, H.I.S. Moderation, a misreading of the dossier of a Kiev agro-chemist, suspect for his moderation.

My book, devoid of poetic verve, planted no words like landmines, dissolving barriers between myth and observation, politics and vision. Designed like an ugly brick, cheaply printed without index, it attracted numerous reviews, respectful, neutral, and venomous, and quickly disappeared. Under pressure rigorous, anonymous, the editors made crucial excisions. One such was an account of Günther Reinmeer, SS Divisional Commander of Treblinka death-squads. Arrested, 1945, he was allowed recruitment, for technology, in the USA, renamed Hans-Georg Wagner. Posing as Jewish, he worked in Venezuela for an Iberian cartel under US management as industrial spy before the CIA dispatched him to Berlin, to shadow fellow ex-Nazis, before retiring to Jerusalem, marrying an Israeli, and with the pension due to a Treblinka survivor. I had added a photo of him at a UN reception, surrounded by respectful statesmen.

I retained no copies of Secret Protocol . Much of it rapidly sickened me. I could never believe, like the young Josef Goebbels, that politics was the miraculous impossible.

I was invited to the Monterey Pop Festival, permitted to meet Jimi Hendrix, before lecturing to a European Studies Department, with its seven students. Despite the more varied work, I watched my concern for contemporary Estonia slowly wilt, only Kitchen Talk expanding, like tiny Japanese pellets changed by water to brilliant insects and petals.

Recalled to London, I found much changed. Alex was again roving abroad, the twins feeble characters in an imaginary book, unreviewed, long remaindered, though plaguing me for failing the responsibilities of friendship. In the Embassy, I fancied myself supernumerary amongst new faces; Mr Tortoise had retired, the Miscellany was abandoned, the building itself shabbier, the establishment penurious. BBC and news editors ignored me, my request to interview Albert Speer, released from Spandau, brusquely refused.

Whitehall continued to embargo an official memorial to the Katyn dead. On the anniversary of the Pact, the European Parliament passed a resolution supporting the illegally occupied Baltic States, the world sighed and went its way. The émigré Estonian National Unity and Democratic Union appealed to the UN Secretary-General, but Western goodwill was outvoted by Soviet and Arab battalions. A Lithuanian boy publicly immolated himself in protest, and in Moscow Andrei Sakharov courageously demanded Baltic self-determination.

Years later I learnt that Arkady Kouk, Soviet agent, had informed MI6 that I was in KGB pay. My favourite World Service producer, German-Jewish devotee of Steinbeck, Heinrich Mann, the Modern Dickens, actually had been.

I met Mr Spender at a party. Without signs of remembering the Paris Conference – who did? – he was friendly, offering me an overcoat, very possibly shoes, then suggesting he recommend me to the CIA-financed Congress of Cultural Freedom. ‘With my name and connections…’

I had little to do but savour old tales: princes devoured by forests, maidens wooed by dragons, oaks rising from sea, the white of an egg finding itself the moon that hatched earth and stars. The Devil’s sons, Malformed, Blind and Lame; the arrow glancing off an iron, oil-black mountain and slaying a hero; the stern warlord seeking his lost home, the youth wresting sword from a rock; the wanderer sad but resolute. They threw long shadows. The Isle of Golden Grass, now the name of a drug-parlour in an American novel; the Northern gods, violent, dishonest, uneasy, bred the creator of the Gestapo, vain and affable Reichsmarschall, the Herr General’s crony.

I was near zero, an extra in an unsuccessful movie. From inertia comes evil.

Café chatter had changed. Less inward, it debated not only the legalization of cannabis but British integration with Europe. Occasionally I envied East Berliners behind their Wall, despite its blood drips. Programmed from above, they had no onus to risk choice, to venture, to think. More often, I was cheered by the strikes and camp unrest reported from the USSR, perhaps still stimulated by the Helsinki Agreement and the UN Declaration of Human Rights.

Irresolution was resolved when Whitehall terminated our tax concessions, and the Embassy soon closed. No shoes or overcoats arrived, the Congress for Cultural Freedom was mute, and I left for Geneva hoping for work at the Palais des Nations. Despite smooth interviews, BBC credits, Secret Protocol , nothing followed. The UN High Commission for Refugees rejected me as insufficiently experienced. Days became monotonous as the Jet d’Eau, and I flew to Stockholm for a vacation.

In a flat near tidy, wooded Skansen, with its Volkish cottages and farms, old-time dances, the quietude irritated, so that I invented risks, was grateful when the telephone rang and nobody spoke, entered taverns in search of a quarrel. Soon, however, I adapted to a small, gracious city without ghoulish, sodium-lit ring roads and flyovers, brash concrete housing blocks, endless development. Instead, quays, masts, trees, statues, parks, galleries, cinemas. Water induced strict architectural lines and proportion. The countryside seeped into the capital, in parks, small woods, belvederes, fresh vivid air.

I had expected the sexual extravagances of Swedish movies, bizarre as the Devils of Gothland, with leathered skinnuttar roaring through streets clean as Holland, girls prancing nude over midsummer fires, an occasional Strindberg mistaking people for trolls, frantic crayfish festivities, sociological natter humourless and prolonged, sex a cool mode of exchange. All was indeed efficient as a carburettor, the ethos tight but benevolent, oiled by unending skål , delicious smörgåsbord . Perfect schools, perfect health, so that I looked for street signs, ‘Blow Your Nose Now.’ A voucher entitled me to live Interchat with Males and Females in Their Own Homes. Had I been blind, the municipality would have provided a talking parrot. An elderly flower-seller confided her belief that she could be prosecuted for not answering the telephone, thus likely to endanger the Health Service by Anti-Social Behaviour. Instead of Bergman movies, I found Lawrence of Arabia , and How the West Was Won . An agency entrusted me to a cultural guide, who escorted me to Thorwaldsen sculpture, Strindberg paintings stormy as his drama, to Josephsons and Nordstroms, then imitation Cézannes and Picassos. I read Dagerman and Lindegreen novels, in English, and, common tourist at large, sauntered through sunlight into the stillness yet expectancy of Rilke’s roses, drank schnapps, wandered intricate rococo-style pavilions, watched Sunday toy-soldier parades – remembering, without admiring, the Swedish war effort, flunkeydom to the Reich, indifference or worse to Norway and Finland, while dredging heroic memories of Gustav Adolf and Charles XII.