by Josef Goebbels for the Daily Mails pro-German coverage of the Saarland referendum, under which the people of the Saarland had the choices of voting to remain under the rule of the League of Nations; join France; or rejoin Germany. On 19 December 1934 Rothermere, his son Esmond, his favorite reporter George Ward Price and the merchant banker Sir Ernest Tennant all had dinner with Hitler at the Reich Chancellery. Rothermere came away from his meeting with Hitler convinced that the major problems in Anglo-German relations was the British refusal to return Tanganyika, Togoland, and Cameroons to Germany. To show his thanks for the dinner at the Reich Chancellery, Rothermore hosted a dinner for Hitler at the Hotel Adlon, the most expensive and prestigious hotel in Germany. In an account of his German visit in the Daily Mail, Rothermere waxed elegant that: "Their interests, our own, and those of the entire civilised world will be best served by close and friendly co-operation between us". Rothermere held the belief that the Foreign Office was not committed to improving Anglo-German relations and started to work as an amateur diplomat as his own. A Hungarian lawyer who worked for Rothermere wrote: "Rothermere conducted his own foreign policy...At even later day, his Lordship [Rothermere] found that the Anglo-German diplomatic service does not work well and acting on his own accord employed her [Hohenlohe] to act as a substitute for the official agents until he came to the conclusion in early 1938 that the British and German diplomatic services are on excellent terms". Upon his return from Germany, Churchill criticised Rothermere, saying he could not understand how Rothermere had been able to shake hands with "those murderous Nazis". In March 1935, impressed by the arguments put forward by Ribbentrop for the return of the former German colonies in Africa, Rothermere published a leader entitled "Germany Must Have Elbow Room". In his leader, Rothermere argued that the Treaty of Versailles was too harsh towards the Reich and claimed that the German economy was being crippled by the loss of the German colonial empire in Africa as he argued that without African colonies to exploit that the German economic recovery from the Great Depression was fragile and shallow. Robert Vansittart, the permanent undersecretary at the Foreign Office, was outraged by Rothermere's article, writing that it was not helpful to have a British press baron championing the German