[14] Dirksen had to politely advise Blomberg that his belief that the "spirit of Locarno" had improved Franco-German relations to such an extent that France would disregard its alliance with Poland should Germany invade the latter country was an illusion.

[15] From the German viewpoint, convincing France that Germany did not plan to start another world war was the key to the efforts to revise Versailles, and the fact that covert rearmament was going on in the Soviet Union was not helpful to this campaign.

[19] Furthermore, Curtius noted that reports (which were true) that the Volga Germans were suffering terribly because of the policies of forced collectivization imposed by the First Five Year Plan made it politically toxic for Germany to get too close to the Soviet Union.

His memory was sometimes poor, and his predictions frequently erroneous, but his observations on the situation in countries to which he was accredited were generally accurate...Like Neurath, Dirksen wanted to maintain tension with Poland to push for revision; Hitler preferred to wait until he was ready for wider schemes.

[29] Shortly after his arrival in Tokyo, Dirksen became involved with the efforts of a shady German businessman, drug dealer, Nazi Party member and friend of Hermann Göring, Ferdinand Heye, to become Special Trade Commissioner in Manchukuo.

[30] Dirksen's backing for Heye's schemes for a monopoly of Manchurian soybeans and his advocacy of German recognition of Manchukuo brought him into conflict with his superior, Foreign Minister Baron Konstantin von Neurath, who preferred closer relations to China than to Japan.

[33] Despite the setback caused by the Heye affair, Dirksen continued his pro-Japanese line by declaring his sympathy for Japan's plans for the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere in return for which he expected German corporations to be allowed to play a prominent role.

[43] Japanese Prime Minister Prince Fumimaro Konoe decided, over the objections of the military, to escalate the war by seeking a "total victory" by making peace terms that he knew that Chiang could never accept.

[54] The German government declared its support for the Karlsbad Programme (which had been secretly drafted in March at a meeting between Hitler and Heinlein), thus beginning the crisis in Central Europe that was to end with the Munich Agreement.

[55] After arriving in London, Dirksen told Viscount Astor, that the speech of the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain given after the Anschluss had "closed the door" on further Anglo-German talks for a resolution of the problems of Europe.

[57] Dirksen reported that Halifax had promised him that London together with Paris were going to send a démarche to Prague urging the Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš to make "concessions to the utmost limit" to the Sudeten Heimatfront, which had demanding autonomy.

[63] Dirksen ended his dispatch with warning that Chamberlain was committed to peace, but the "psychotic" British people might push him into war, writing: "To regard the excitement of the last weeks as mere bluff might turn out to be a fatal error".

[73] In September 1938, at the Nuremberg Party Congress, Dirksen met Hitler, where he told him of his fears of a general war, and of his belief that the British were prepared to pressure the Czechoslovak government into ceding the Sudetenland to Germany as the price for peace.

[76] In response, Baron Ernst von Weizsäcker, the State Secretary of the Auswärtiges Amt, wrote back to Dirksen to say that campaign in the German media bashing British rearmament "was instigated on the direct orders of the Foreign Minister".

[95] About the British efforts to create a "peace front" to "contain" Germany, Dirksen told Halifax that the entire German people were "unanimously determined to parry this danger of encirclement and not to tolerate a repetition of 1914".

[102] Dirksen also wrote that "a surprise initiative on the part of Chamberlain is within the bounds of probability and it is quite possible that rumor current here, that he will approach Germany with new proposals after the completion of the negotiations with the Russians will materialize into fact in one form or another".

[102] In Dirksen's viewpoint, the proposed alliance with the Soviet Union that would form the eastern anchor of the "peace front" was merely a negotiating tactic for a Munich-type deal to resolve the Danzig crisis rather a means of deterring Germany from invading Poland.

[102] In early July 1939, Dirksen reported to the Wilhelmstrasse that British public opinion would come to understand that the "justice" of the German demand that the Free City of Danzig be allowed to rejoin Germany.

[105] On 17 July 1939, Helmuth Wohlthat, Hermann Göring's deputy in the Four Year Plan organization, attended the meeting of the International Whaling Conference in London as part of the German delegation, and the next day, he and Dirksen met Sir Horace Wilson, the Chief Industrial Adviser to the Government and one of Chamberlain's closest friends.

According to Hudson's notes, in exchange for a German promise not to invade Poland and ending the Anglo-German arms race, there would be a plan for the industrialists running the heavy industry of Germany, Britain and the United States to work together in the economic development of China, Eastern Europe and Africa; of a loan in sum of hundreds of millions for Germany to be floated in the City and on Wall Street; and some sort of plan for the "international governance" of Africa, and he ended his account by saying that if only Hitler would just learn to think in economic terms, much was possible.

On 22 July 1939, The Daily Telegraph and the News Chronicle both broke the story on their front-pages that Britain just had offered Germany a loan worth hundreds of millions of pound sterling in exchange for not attacking Poland.

[124] Most notably, Dirksen has Wilson saying that the proposed Anglo-German non-aggression pact would both cancel out the "guarantee" to Poland and the negotiations with the Soviet Union, with the clear implication that Germany would have all of Eastern Europe in exchange for leaving the British empire alone.

The American historian Zachery Shore argued that Dirksen had no reason to fabricate such an offer from Wilson, and Chamberlain was in fact seeking to begin secret negotiations for an Anglo-German nonaggression pact in Switzerland that would have seen Britain abandon Poland.

[132] Attolico reported this to Rome, and as the Germans had broken the Italian diplomatic codes, Dirksen was summoned to the Wilhelmstrasse by Ribbentrop to be screamed at and berated for his incompetence, and to be told he was now excluded from all political discussions as a security risk.

[133] In 1943, Dirksen published a picture book, Freundesland im Osten ein Nipponbuch in Bildern, containing a collection of photographs of daily Japanese life that he had taken during his time as ambassador in Japan.

[137] Tresnak wrote that Dirksen's memoirs showed that he, in all essentials, fully agreed with Hitler's plans to destroy the international order that had been established by the Treaty of Versailles and to have Germany become the world's strongest power.

[137] Tresnak ended his review by remarking, "He has tears aplenty for torn and defeated Germany, but not a word of sympathy for the millions of murdered Jews, Poles, Yugoslavs, Czechs, and the rest.... After reading Herr von Dirksen's book, one cannot help feeling that he, and perhaps other Germans as well, condemn Hitler chiefly on the grounds that he did not win the war–though sometimes they act as they are not aware that he lost it".

[137] In a review, the American political scientist Joseph Schectman noted that Dirksen expressed much anger in his memoirs about the expulsions of Germans from Eastern Europe but failed once to mention that Germany had killed about 1,500,000 Poles and 6,000,000 Jews during the war.

[141] In 1950, Wilmoswky used Dirksen, Heinrich Brüning, Franz von Papen and Belgion as his major advisers on the latest book that Regnery was going to publish, which was intended to deny that industrialists like him had supported the Nazi regime and used slave labour during World War II.

[139] Belgion wrote to Dirksen: "My own feeling is that such a book... would not appeal to the general public unless it could be cast in the form of a dramatic story and that would require on the part of the author a rare combination of gifts—an understanding of the problems of large-scale business and also an ability to give the exposition of them a magic touch.