in the belief that he could serve as a mediator between the Soviet Union and Germany. The Red Army plundered the castle but became more respectful when Dirksen showed them a photograph taken in the early 1930s of himself and the Defense Commissar, Marshal Kliment Voroshilov. Voroshilov was unique under Stalin as being the only member of the Soviet Politburo allowed to have a personality cult of his own. Ribbentrop believed that Dirksen would betray secrets to the Soviets and ordered him to be taken back. An Abwehr team was infiltrated into Gröditzberg and arrived at the castle to tell Dirksen that he was coming, regardless of what he might think. On a cold February night, Dirksen and the Abwehr team walked through the frozen fields back to the German lines. Dirksen left behind his private papers at the castle, which were captured by the Red Army. In 1948, the Narkomindel published a very-selective version of Dirksen's papers dealing with his time as ambassador in London to support the official Soviet historical line that British appeasement had been aimed at causing a German-Soviet war to save British capitalism, thus justifying the 1939 German-Soviet Pact to thwart the alleged British scheme. Later life In 1947, Dirksen was cleared by a denazification court, which declared him not have been an active party member. In 1950, Dirksen published his memoirs, Moskau, Tokyo, London, recounting his career as a diplomat in the Soviet Union, Japan and the United Kingdom. He stated quite flatly that he was not ashamed that he had joined the Nazi Party in 1936, as the regime had achieved "impressive" political and economic changes in Germany. In a review of the book, the American historian Fritz Epstein noted that there were significant differences between the book's German original, published in 1950, and the English version, published in 1952. One is that the section dealing with Dirksen's time as a diplomat in the Netherlands in 1917 had been reduced from three pages to six lines. Also, his time as a diplomat in Kiev dealing with the puppet regime of Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi had six pages in the German original but three pages in the English edition. In another review, the Canadian scholar Frank Tresnak asked about the differences between Germany's traditional elite and the Nazi elite. He answered, "If were we are to judge by this book, there seems to have been