von Blomberg proposed sending officers to the military mission in China. In late 1937, Dirksen become involved in attempts to mediate the end of the Sino-Japanese war. The war had caused a major bureaucratic power struggle within the German government: the Wehrmacht and the Auswärtiges Amt supported China, but the Dienststelle Ribbentrop, the SS and the Propaganda Ministry supported Japan. Dirksen, a pro-Japanese voice in the pro-Chinese Auswärtiges Amt, feared that his career might become marginalized, as Neurath was annoyed at Dirksen's support for the pro-Japanese Ribbentrop, which led Dirksen to suggest German mediation to end the war before the struggle between the pro-Japanese and pro-Chinese factions destroyed his career. Neurath feared that he might lose out in the power struggle with Ribbentrop and took up the suggestion of mediation as a way out. Hitler was indecisive about which side to back. On 3 November 1937, Japanese Foreign Minister Kōki Hirota gave Dirksen a set of peace terms, which Dirksen sent to Neurath, who in his turn passed them along to Oskar Trautmann, the German ambassador in China, to be handed over to the Chinese. On 7 December 1937, Dirksen met with Hirota to report that Chiang Kai-shek was willing to make peace with Japan if China did not lose any more territory but was otherwise open to "peace talks on the basis of Japanese peace conditions". That posed a problem as ever since the war had begun in July 1937, Japan never stated any war aims other than to "chastise" the Chinese in the "holy war" waged for the sake of the god-emperor of Japan. The Japanese cabinet met to begin discussions of the peace terms that would be sought, but on 13 December 1937, the Japanese Army took the Chinese capital of Nanjing, which caused a euphoric mood in Tokyo. 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. On 21 December 1937, Dirksen was presented with the Japanese peace terms to be presented to the Chinese, which were so extreme that even Dirksen remarked that they seemed to be written only to inspire their rejection by the Chinese. Dirksen took a very pro-Japanese and anti-Chinese line on the question of mediation and said that if Germany had to choose Japan over China