Diplomats and Martyrs (original) (raw)

The Past: Carlton House Terrace

DIPLOMATS AND MARTYRS

THE WHITE corner building No. 9 Carlton House Terrace, now occupied by the Royal Society, is a mute reminder also of "the other Germany". This is represented pre-eminently by three German diplomats who had worked there in the thirties - Count Albrecht von Bernstorff, Herbert Mumm von Schwarzenstein and Eduard Br�cklmeier. Ambassador Hans von Herwarth organised a commemoration ceremony in their honour on 27 June 1961, combined with the unveiling of a plaque in the Belgrave Square Embassy. They were "unusual civil servants" carrying out their superiors' orders, but also patriots who deeply felt the shame that Hitler had inflicted on their country's honour and reacted accordingly. They became martyrs.

Count Albrecht von Bernstorff (1890-1945) was perhaps the best known in London where he had served, the third of that old North German family to do so, as a diplomat, for eleven years. He had been an Oxford Rhodes scholar before World War One and came back soon afterwards to join the re-opened Embassy of the Weimar Republic as Legationssekret�r, a man large in stature and spirit, six feet tall, who loved people, talk, laughter, freedom. "He sailed through London's life", his friend Enid Bagnold, the British writer, said of him, "like a light craft of immense proportions."

Dangerously careless about voicing his views of Hitler and the Nazis, he was clearly courting trouble. He rejected the chance of staying in England where most of his friends were, because of his anxiety over the family estate at Stintenburg in Mecklenburg. So he gave up his diplomatic career and did what was, in 1933, the most extraordinary, foolhardy thing to do: he joined the board of Wassermann & Co., the official bank of the Jewish community in Berlin. It was a brave move, deliberately made to help the Jews. He sheltered some of them in his home, facilitated their escape abroad. Inevitably, also as a member of the Solf circle, he was arrested at the beginning of the War. He was taken to Ravensbr�ck Concentration Camp, where Hanna Solf was also imprisoned. After the War she told Harold Nicolson how she stood on a stool in her cell when she knew that Bernstorff would pass by, being taken back to his own cell after interrogation. Looking out through the fanlight of her door, she saw him with blood all over his face, supported by two wardens. He looked up at her and smiled. She said that she had never seen a like expression of suffering and grim resolve.

Bernstorff was sent back to the Berlin prison in the Prinz Albrecht Strasse to stand trial in the People's Court. The notorious Nazi judge Roland Freisler was not, however, to have the satisfaction of sentencing him. The court building was hit in an air-raid, Freisler was among the injured and dying. His body was taken to the Elisabeth Hospital nearby and received by a nurse who happened to be Bernstorff's sister. When the Russians liberated the prison and its inmates on 25 April 1945, Bernstorff was no longer there. According to fellow-prisoners he had been taken away two nights earlier and presumably shot outside on the Ulapgel�nde. This was done, it was said, by order of Ribbentrop or another high-ranking Nazi. They had pursued him with their hatred because of a story in the Allied press, that he was seen to be one of the few Germans suitable to head a future German Government, since the Allies were unlikely to negotiate with anyone else.

The Rhinelander Herbert Mumm (1898-1945) was only briefly in London as Legationssekret�r in 1925. He also served in Oslo, Tokyo and became Assistant Head of Protocol at the Foreign Ministry in Berlin where his undisguised contempt of the Nazis caused him to be arrested twice and ultimately shot at Brandenburg prison on 20 April 1945.

The third of these heros was Eduard Robert Wolfgang Br�cklmeier (1903-1944), a Bavarian, who had served in London in 1935 and 1936 under Hoesch and Ribbentrop. Ambassador von Herwarth recalled that, in 1938, when he and Count Schulenburg, both then at the Embassy in Moscow, were in Berlin and called on their old friend and colleague, Br�cklmeier urged them to do their utmost via the Moscow embassies to persuade Britain, France and the United States not to give in to Hitler over the Czechoslovakian crisis. But other counsels prevailed. Having aroused the suspicion of Heydrich, Br�cklmeier was arrested and executed at Pl�tzensee on 20 October 1944.

Three "chevaliers sans peur et sans reproche", Herwarth described them, "witnesses of that other Germany, men of goodwill, and animated by Pascal's esprit de finesse."

The Belgrave Square commemoration was attended by relatives of all three men. Sir Harold Nicolson who had done much at the end and after the War to bring the fate and sacrifice of his old friend Bernstorff to the notice of British people, gave the memorial address. "If only the dead could know", he said, "that their sacrifice was not in vain. What consolation it would be for those three, to learn that in the Embassy of a liberated and powerful Germany, Germans and British have met to honour them."