Another prominent Briton visits Hitler at Berchtesgaden

The British government’s attempt to present Lord Halifax’s visit to Germany as an “unofficial” exercise began to look exceedingly threadbare when Halifax travelled on from Berlin to see the Führer at his mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden. Ostensibly Halifax had gone to Berlin to attend the International Hunting Exhibition but travelling the extra 700km or so to Bavaria made plain his journey’s true purpose. Halifax long afterwards claimed to have mistaken Hitler for a footman when he first saw him but there is no sign that he treated him with anything less than the deference due to a head of state at the time. The talks did not produce any immediately practical results, but Halifax did refer to the possibility of boundary changes in eastern Europe, a tacit signal to Hitler that Britain had no objection in principle to revision of the Versailles settlement. Official statements that Maxim Litvinov the Soviet Foreign Minister was a “great and worthy” champion of the regime da