1 PEACEFUL CHANGE OR WAR? 37wHy tHe wilHelmstrAsse interview?
McNeill maintains that Hitler’s meeting with Toynbee was part of
the German leader’s effort to ‘conciliate (and confuse)’ French and
British opinion in the lead up to the planned remilitarisation of the
Rhineland.^120 On February 21, Hitler had conducted a similar interview
with the French journalist Bertrand de Jouvenel, during the course of
which Hitler explained that the ‘bad things’ that he wrote about France
in Mein Kamph should be viewed in the context of his then imprison-
ment and the fact that France and Germany were enemies at the time.
According to Jouvenel, Hitler stated in the interview that he wished
to succeed in bringing about Franco-German rapprochement but also
warned that if the prospective Franco-Soviet Pact of Mutual Assistance
was ratified by France, a new situation would be created. Appended
to this warning, again according to Jouvenel, was the observation that
there were ‘other great nations which are less immune to the bacillus of
Bolshevism than we.’ Jouvenel recorded that the German chancellor fin-
ished by declaring that in respect to Franco-German relations that ‘he
was speaking for the whole German people when he said...that France
herself, if she only wished, could put an end forever to the “German
peril” because the German people had the fullest confidence in is leader
and its leader desired peace with France.’^121
McNeill points out that it was a week after Hitler’s interview with
Jouvenel that Toynbee was identified by Hitler or by one of Hitler’s
advisers as a ‘suitably influential shaper’ of British opinion.^122 Toynbee’s
own explanation as to how the meeting came about concerns remarks
he had made in the annual Survey of International Affairs which he
produced along with Veronica Boulter on behalf of the RIIA. Therein
Toynbee addressed what he described as the fourth in a series of shocks
(^120) McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life, 172.
(^121) ‘Interview given by Chancellor Hitler to M. Bertrand de Jouvenel, February 21,
1936,’ in F. J. Berber, ed., Locarno: A Collection of Documents (London: William Hodge,
1936), 181–3. The Franco-Soviet Assistance Pact was ratified by the French Chamber of
Deputies on February 27. See also Bertrand de Jouvenel, ‘“Soyons amis”: Interview avec
Adolf Hitler,’ Paris-Midi, February 28, 1936; Daniel Knegt, Fascism, Liberalism and
Europeanism in the Political Thought of Bertrand de Jouvenel (Amsterdam: Amsterdam
University Press, 2017), 58, and McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life, 172.
(^122) McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life, 172.