Trott developed a strong interest in international politics during a stay in Geneva, seat of the League of Nations, for several weeks in Autumn 1928.

[5] In his 1961 book All Souls and Appeasement, which was published when active homosexuality was still a crime in Britain, Rowse wrote about Trott's "beautiful head" with an "immensely lofty forehead, deep-violet eyes, nobility and sadness in the expression even when young, infinitely sensitive and understanding".

[10] In the same letter, Trott argued that what was needed was an economic system that guaranteed every man a job, and that he considered the individual freedom to count for nothing if one was unemployed.

[11] Somewhat to the shock of his conservative father, in the early 1930s Trott was willing to exchange ideas with Social Democrats as he set about developing a sort of socialist conservatism.

[13] The British historian D. C. Watt rather dismissively wrote that Trott was an impractical idealist who spent much of 1937 and 1938 in China looking for the answers to the problems of modern life by studying Confucianism and Taoism.

[15] Together with his Chinese teacher who served as his translator, Trott traveled several times to Beijing to talk to various Confucian scholars living in that city, hoping to find the spirituality that he believed the West was lacking and needed so desperately.

[13] During his time in China, Trott got to know the head of the German military mission, General Alexander von Falkenhausen, very well, and as both men were disillusioned by the pro-Japanese line taken by the Auswärtiges Amt after the very pro-Japanese and anti-Chinese Joachim von Ribbentrop became Foreign Minister in February 1938, they bonded over their shared disapproval of Ribbentrop and his anti-Chinese foreign policy line.

[13] One of Trott's closest friends was the British journalist Shiela Grant Duff who, however, passionately disagreed with him over the issue of Czechoslovakia, a country that she admired and loved as much he hated it.

[18] After the Munich Agreement Trott, in a letter to his friend Lord Lothian, praised "Mr. Chamberlain's courageous lead" in ensuring that the Sudetenland was allowed to join Germany without a war and disparaged Winston Churchill as a "warmonger".

[21] As a Rhodes scholar, Trott was able to use his friends from Oxford in the Establishment to meet Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax in June 1939.

[12] At his meeting with Chamberlain at Chequers, Trott was informed that it was not possible for Britain to end the "guarantee" of Poland and that if Germany wanted better relations, "it was for Herr Hitler to undo the mischief he had done".

[25] Chamberlain complained that British public opinion had been "passionately stirred" by the German occupation of the rump state of Czecho-Slovakia in March 1939 and that Britain would go to war with Germany rather than see another nation "destroyed".

[25] Trott returned to Britain for a third visit to repeat his "Danzig for Prague" offer, and this time he stated he was not coming on behalf of the German government, but rather as a representative of a resistance group, which confused British officials as to his true loyalties.

[28] Wheeler-Bennett further wrote that Trott and his friend Helmuth von Moltke, who came with him to London, were both intense German nationalists who "...though they deplored the spirit of the Munich Agreement and the subsequent dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, expressed strong anti-Czech sentiments, and from neither was there forthcoming any indication that a 'de-nazified' Germany was prepared to forgo Hitler's annexation of Austria and the Sudetenland.

[30] The German historian Hans Mommsen wrote that the majority of the conservatives opposed to Hitler in no way wanted a return to the democratic Weimar Republic, which they also rejected, but instead looked back to the reformers who restructured Prussia during the Napoleonic Wars as their ideal and role model.

[35] In a letter to Grant Duff, Trott wrote: "You have not satisfactorily answered my argument, that it is possible that capitalist and imperialist democracy may use liberty simply as a cloak for a policy that relies very much on compulsion, whereas some aspects of 'authoritarian systems could provide a basically more genuine guarantee of human rights in modern industrial society".

[36] Trott called for a political system that would secure the "liberation of the masses from economic need" by the authoritarian rule by the traditional elites, whose values would be based on Christianity.

[42] During the conference in Virginia Beach, Trott met numerous members of the business and academic worlds of the United States and Canada who were interested in China.

To the suggestion that a non-Nazi Germany might, as an earnest of good faith, restore some of the territorial acquisitions of Adolf Hitler, von Trott returned an uncompromising negative".

[46] The day-to-day work with Bose became the responsibility of Trott,[45] who used the cover of the Special Bureau for his anti-Nazi activities[47][45] by travelling to Scandinavia, Switzerland and Turkey and all of Nazi-occupied Europe to seek out German military officers opposing Nazism.

[53] In 1942, Trott, together with other members of the Kreisau Circle, became vaguely aware of the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" and became curious of the fate of the Jews sent away to "resettlement in the East".

[37] In 1943, Trott wrote: "An exclusively rationalist upbringing has made us fail to understand both human nature and the realities of mass society, and we have come to ignore the demons which the Vermassung of mankind has released".

[55] Despite Trott's reputation as someone oriented towards "Western" values, based on his education at Oxford and his Anglo-American friends, he was in fact deeply hostile towards the American "pioneer" ideal of a rugged individualist on both moral and practical grounds and believed that such individualism promoted selfishness, greed and amorality.

[55] Moreover, Trott believed life in the mir was simple and in harmony with nature; was untouched by either modern technology or ideology; and allowed people to be honest, spiritual and personal in a way that was not possible in either the Soviet Union or the West.

[55] Trott belonged to the "Easterner" faction of the opposition, which favoured making peace with the Soviet Union first after the overthrow of Hitler and distrusted the "Anglo-Saxon" powers of the United States and Great Britain.

[57] As a result, the underground SPD politicians asked their "parlour-pink" friend Trott to appeal to the United States and Britain to change their policies towards Germany.

[58] In April 1944, during a visit to Switzerland, Trott met with British and American diplomats to complain that to most anti-Nazi Germans, it seemed that "the Anglo-Saxon countries are filled with bourgeois prejudice and pharisaic theorizing", in contrast to the Soviets, who were offering "constructive ideas and plans for the rebuilding of Germany".

[58] Wheeler-Bennett wrote that Trott was "no Red sympathizer" and what he was "endeavouring to do, in fact, was to induce London and Washington to engage in a bidding match with Moscow from the result of which Germany could not but benefit, but he certainly did not favor a Bolshevik solution".

[61] In July 1998, the British magazine Prospect published an edited version of the lecture given by the German historian Joachim Fest at the inauguration of the Adam von Trott Meeting Room at Balliol College, Oxford.

Fest said: Few witnesses have spoken up for the resistance and few sentences have survived to describe the debates of the "Kreisauer Kreis," the urgent pleas of Stauffenberg and Tresckow, the thoughts of Haefte, Moltke, York and Leber.