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He wrote to his close friend Robert Brennan, the Irish envoy in Washington, that he had ‘noted that my call on the German minister on the announcement of Hitler’s death was played up to the utmost. I expected this’, and he added:
I could have had a diplomatic illness but, as you know, I would scorn that sort of thing…So long as we retained our diplomatic relations with Germany, to have failed to call upon the German representative would have been an act of unpardonable discourtesy to the German nation and to Dr Hempel himself. During the whole of the war, Dr Hempel’s conduct was irreproachable. He was always friendly and invariably correct—in marked contrast with Gray. I certainly was not going to add to his humiliation in the hour of defeat.
De Valera felt that shirking his visit would have set a bad precedent. It was, he thought, of considerable importance that the formal acts of courtesy should be made on occasions such as the death of a head of state and that they should not have attached to them any further special significance, such as connoting approval or disapproval of the politics of the state in question or of its head: ‘It is important that it should never be inferred that these formal acts imply the passing of any judgements good or bad’, he concluded. In Dáil Éireann, de Valera stated that his visit ‘implied no question of approval or disapproval or judgement of any kind on the German people of the state represented here’. He added that there was little publicity given to the fact that the Dáil had been adjourned on the death of President Roosevelt.
