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 

Hoping for Another Munich

Far into the war a soft-spoken Swedish machine-tool manufac-
turer, Birger Dahlerus, would act as the secret, unofficial link
between Göring and Neville Chamberlain. His presence in Lon-
don was kept top secret, and great anguish was felt there in 
when it was realized that he had compiled a fifty-four-page
dossier revealing how the Foreign Office had “bungled the ne-
gotiations” and even rejected what he called “a reasonable set-
tlement” in . The Dahlerus dossier virtually shifted the war
guilt onto Britain and Poland; in the wrong hands, warned the
Foreign Office, the file would have a “devastating effect,” and it
assembled a rebuttal in case the Swedes ever leaked it. In October
 the Foreign Office decided to blackmail Dahlerus into si-
lence by threatening to put his exports on the blockade blacklist.
The dossier began on July , . Dahlerus had recently
toured Britain’s industrial midlands and met many British busi-
nessmen. Visiting Göring at Carinhall that day, he talked of the