Vansittart, Robert Gilbert Vansittart, Baron

▪ British diplomat and author

born June 25, 1881, Farnham, Surrey, Eng.

died Feb. 14, 1957, Denham, Buckinghamshire

      British diplomat, author, and extreme Germanophobe.

      Vansittart was educated at Eton and then trained for diplomatic service. He was first secretary at the Paris Peace Conference (1919–20) and principal private secretary to Lord Curzon (1920–24) and to successive prime ministers (1928–30). As permanent under secretary at the Foreign Office (1930–38), he warned the British government of the growing military power of Germany and insisted that Great Britain should rearm. Vansittart espoused a Germanophobic doctrine—which became known as vansittartism—that held that the conduct of German war leaders from the time of the Franco-German War (1870–71) had had the wholehearted support of the German people and that Germany had to be permanently demilitarized to ensure against future agression.

      Vansittart was regarded by Neville Chamberlain as a hindrance to the British government's efforts to reach a settlement with Hitler. During the Czech crisis of 1938 Vansittart was made chief diplomatic adviser to the government, a post of no importance. He retired in 1941 and was raised to the peerage (which became extinct upon his death).

      Vansittart wrote novels, verse, and plays, among them Les Pariahs (1902) and Dead Heat (1939). In his autobiography, The Mist Procession, published posthumously in 1958, he could recall no major issue on which his advice was taken, and he described his life as “a story of failure.”

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