until the twenty-eighth. Later Göring dictated to him the route
his plane must take to avoid being shot down over Germany.
Dahlerus was back in Göring’s Berlin villa a few minutes
after midnight. This time he had brought a document drafted
by another high Foreign Office official. It spoke of Britain’s anxi-
ety for a “settlement” with Hitler, but upheld the guarantee to
Poland. It was vague and diplomatically phrased, but Göring
proclaimed himself satisfied and took it over to Hitler. He
phoned the hotel in sparkling mood at : .. “The Führer,”
he told the Swede, “agrees with every point but he wants to
know, is Britain proposing that this settlement culminate in a
treaty, or in an alliance? The Führer would prefer the latter.”
Sunshine broke out in Dahlerus’s heart. The wiretappers
heard him phoning the British embassy jubilantly at : ..
“We had a message early from Dahlerus,” wrote Lord Halifax in
his diary, “saying that he thought things were satisfactory and
hoped ‘nothing foolish’ would be done by either end to upset
them.”
By five-thirty that morning, August , , Dahlerus and
staff at the British embassy had composed a telegram advising
London on how to phrase the reply that Henderson was to
carry back to Berlin. Göring’s wiretappers followed closely.
Dressed in a green gown clasped at the waist with a jewel-
studded buckle, he welcomed the Swede back at Kurfürst at :
.. “You look like you had a good night’s sleep,” he said with a
broad grin. (He knew precisely where Dahlerus had been all
night and even showed him the FA’s nocturnal crop of Brown
Pages.) Göring again undertook that if Chamberlain reached
agreement with Hitler, Germany would “withhold assistance
from any power that attempted to attack... Great Britain, even
if it should be Italy, Russia, or Japan” Hitler’s own allies.
Göring was cocksure, and so was Hitler now. That morning