The private fortunes of great men form a subject usually neglected by their biographers. The more idolizing the biographer, the less apt he is to consider it, as if such a hero's fortune were a partie honteuse in his life. In Bismarck's case, the forms and size of his fortune and the ways he acquired it, matters about which he himself was never reticent, were the object of hostile contemporary pamphleteering and much gossip then and later among friends and foes, high and low, princes and underlings.

In acknowledging the congratulations of Lord D'Abernon, British Ambassador to Germany, upon the successful outcome of the Locarno negotiations, the British Foreign Secretary, Austen Chamberlain, wrote: “… we have owed much to your action and influence in Berlin—exactly how much I want some day to learn. I have been discreet in asking no questions about the origins of Stresemann's initiative.” Lord D'Abernon has long been recognized as the god-parent of the 1925 reciprocal security pact between Germany, France, and Belgium, guaranteed by Britain and Italy, which appeared to have stabilized the West European status quo. He and Carl von Schubert, the State Secretary of the German Foreign Ministry, were in the habit of referring to it in its initial stages as “das Kind,” and the Ambassador watched over its development with tender care. This paper examines D'Abernon's role in the drafting of the proposals which were to lead to the West European security pact.

For Adolf Hitler the problem of constructing a loyal and reliable instrument of force for employment not only against external enemies but also for intra-party discipline was a frequently recurring one. In the summer of 1921 what was to become the Sturm Abteilungen (Storm Troops, “SA”) had its genesis under the camouflage of so-called “gymnastic societies.” The SA, however, soon developed into a mass organization with an internal dynamism of its own which sometimes operated in opposition to Hitler's own aims. Friction between Hitler and Ernst Roehm began, in fact, at least as early as 1925 and precipitated Roehm's temporary self-imposed exile in Bolivia. The problematical loyalty of the SA prompted Hitler during the general party reconstruction of that year to order the organization of a special troop under the command of one of his bodyguards, Julius Schreck. This new body, at first termed Stabswache (Staff Guard), was assigned the tasks of protecting Hitler and other prominent Nazi personages and, somewhat anomalously, of securing new party members and subscriptions to the Völkischer Beobachter. Other similar groups, always small and carefully selected, made their appearance and were accorded the collective designation Schutzstaffeln (Protection Squads, “SS”).