second half of 1937, when he was deciding about his plan to overthrow Austria and Czechoslovakia; his decisions were not proof of high intuition or intellect but were based on information received from Vansittart, among other well-placed politicians and officers in Britain, like Lord Lothian, Lord Mount Temple, Oliver Vaughan Gurney Hoare (Sir Samuel Hoare's younger brother) and others. It is not known how much that encouraged Hitler, but he later stated very similar views: "the Führer believed that almost certainly Britain and probably France as well, had already tacitly written off the Czechs and were reconciled to the fact that this question would be cleared up in due course by Germany." After the war, an effort was made to cover up Vansittart's embarrassing "real friendship" with Henlein. In the late 1930s, Vansittart together with Reginald Leeper, the Foreign Office's Press Secretary, often leaked information to a private newspaper, The Whitehall Letter, edited by Victor Gordon Lennox, the anti-appeasement diplomatic editor of the Daily Telegraph. That brought him into conflict with the political leadership at the time, and he was removed as Permanent Under-Secretary in 1938. A new post as "Chief Diplomatic Adviser to His Majesty's Government" was instead created ad hoc for him in which he served until 1941. Germanophobia Vansittart was also involved in intelligence work. In 1940, Vansittart sued the American historian Harry Elmer Barnes for libel for an article, written by Barnes in 1939, accusing him of then plotting aggression against Germany. During the war, Vansittart became a prominent advocate of a very anti-German line. His earlier worries about Germany were reformulated into an argument that Germany was intrinsically militaristic and aggressive. In Black Record: Germans Past and Present (1941), Vansittart portrayed Nazism as just the latest manifestation of Germany's continuous record of aggression from the time of the Roman Empire. Therefore, after Germany was defeated, it must be stripped of all military capacity, including its heavy industries. The German people enthusiastically supported Hitler's wars of aggression, just as they supported the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 and World War I in 1914. They must be thoroughly re-educated under strict Allied supervision for at least a generation. De-Nazification was not enough. The German military elite was the real cause of war, especially the "Prussianist" officer corps and the German General Staff: both must be destroyed. In 1943 he wrote: In the opinion of the author, it is